


The Search

by Elsby72



Series: Archer's Paradox [2]
Category: Arrow (TV 2012)
Genre: Action, Algae Action, Colonialism, Cultural Appropriation, Fake Science, League of Assassins - Freeform, Magical Science, POV Multiple, Romance, algae - Freeform, glasses!
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-02-26
Updated: 2016-09-18
Packaged: 2018-03-15 07:11:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 21
Words: 76,966
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3438239
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elsby72/pseuds/Elsby72
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Sometimes something gets lost on purpose… sometimes it doesn’t get lost at all. Besides, you’re in the story now. The bracelet shows the song. The song knows the ending. How are you going to get to the ending without the map to the song?”</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This story is a continuation of "The Fall", and might make more sense if read in order. Thanks for reading!

As the sun lingered on the horizon, staining the endless snow around them a rich rust orange, Oliver and Tommy considered the drop in front of them.

“This is where you climbed up?” Tommy sounded uncertain. 

“No. I came up on the other side. It’s a little less sheer over there.” Oliver gestured behind him, to where the cliff's edge was obscured by distance and buildings looming out of the ground like giant gravestones. The League had built their ceremonial structures on the highest point for hundreds of miles, on top of a plateau that jutted up thousands of feet from the tundra. The land below them was honeycombed with the tunnels of the mine. Oliver hadn't realized, until he had climbed out of the mine, how extensively it ran around and beneath the shelters of the League. He wondered, vaguely, if they could use that in their battle plan.

“So why did we pick this way to go down?”

When Oliver had first come, the League had been expecting him, so he had scaled the plateau at its easiest point – which was still nearly inaccessible. Now they were considering a climb down a far more formidable face. “Because it seemed like a good idea not to alert the League to our presence before we got started. This is the only passage down the mountain that they don't keep guarded.” Oliver voice was distracted. He was calculating.

“And they don't guard it because...” Tommy's voice was flat, as though he already knew the answer. 

“Because they consider it impassable.” Finally, Oliver looked at Tommy. “You were there when Kaya and I were discussing all of this, Tommy. Why all the questions?”

Tommy looked down. “I guess I was distracted.” Oliver remembered the looks that he and N'sal had directed at one another across the hurried, urgent planning sessions. He sighed.

“Let's just scale one impossible obstacle at a time, OK? And no more getting distracted.” Oliver took the length of rope that he had coiled and fastened to the outside of his pack and began to run it through his hands, counting arm's lengths. About thirty feet. “It's about a 3,000 foot drop, but the hardest part is going to be the first thousand, because it's a long, gradual overhang. Actually, if one of us falls during that part, the rope might not do us much good; it would be almost impossible to pull someone else up while you're trying to keep yourself on the wall.” Oliver decided not to point out that, with only one arm, it would be entirely impossible. “But after the rock angles out again, the rope might save us, so we're going to use it. I'll go first, find someplace to tie off, and wait for you to meet up with me – then we'll do it again. We'll need to make 300 feet an hour in order to make it down before the sun comes up. It's going to be tight.”

“Won't it be faster if we take turns lead-lining?” Tommy's voice was still doubtful as he stood at the edge of the cliff and eyed the sickening drop.

Oliver paused. “Tommy, if we lose contact with the wall in the first thousand feet – either one of us – we're dead. There's no way to recover; or at least, not quickly enough to make it down before the sun. It's going to be like holding a pull-up for hours on end. With a backpack on. And the lead-liner is going to have to do that at the same time that they find solid holds and tie off.” Oliver kept his voice carefully neutral. 

Tommy surprised him by laughing.

“Dude, you're going to sprain something if you keep working this hard to keep from talking about it. I only have one arm. This is something that's gonna be a lot easier with two. Got it.”

Uncertain of Tommy's tone, Oliver began to knot one end of the rope around his own waist. As he looped the other end around Tommy, the latter went on.

“Look, when I first lost the arm, I went through all this shit. You know, trying to figure out what I can and can't do, how other people saw me. Getting pissed off at people trying to help me and then pissed off at people for not helping me. Wondering....” Tommy swallowed, hard. “Wondering how Laurel would look at me, if she knew.” Oliver was silent; he knew that Tommy wasn't looking for reassurance.

“But that was two years ago, man. I can do just about everything I used to be able to do. Actually, I can do way more than I used to be able to do. But some stuff is always going to be easier, or safer, or faster with two arms, and if you start dancing around the subject, it's going to be a long trip.” Tommy grabbed Oliver's wrist, stopping him in his work until the he looked up. “Oliver - we don't have time to make this a long trip.”

Oliver nodded briskly and gave the knot a final tug, hoping that it would hold under tension. He didn't realize how much he had been avoiding the subject before, but now he felt as though one small weight had been removed from his pack. He hadn't doubted Tommy's ability to make the trip – seeing him fight proved that having one arm wasn't holding him back physically. But he hadn't known about what psychic scars the injury might have left, and he realized now that he had held back from asking out of fear of what the answer might be. 

“OK, got it.” Oliver tugged Tommy's end of the rope towards him so that they were standing together at the edge of the cliff. “You're only marginally less useless than you used to be.”

“Screw you too, man.” Tommy's grin faded as he looked once more over the cliff. “This is going to suck, isn't it?”

Oliver ignored the question. “Here's the system. When I'm tied off, I'll tug on the rope twice. If either of us is in trouble and can't move, we tug three times. Got it? Twice for go ahead and three times for trouble.” He looked at Tommy and waited until the other man met his gaze. “One more thing. If either of us falls away from the wall or gets too badly injured to go on, we cut the rope. Immediately.”

Tommy shook his head, decisively, and turned back to the cliff. “That won't happen.”

“ _Tommy._ It might. And if it does, the other one goes on. OK? No exceptions. No negotiation. If one of us doesn't make it, the other one has to.” He grabbed Tommy's arm and turned him so that they were once more facing each other. “Four tugs. That means cut the rope and keep going. Got it?” When Tommy didn't answer, he gave his arm a shake. “Promise me, Tommy.”

“I promise.” After a moment, Tommy smiled weakly. “How many tugs for, 'everything is swell'?”

“I don't think we're going to need a code for that.” With that, Oliver lowered himself over the edge of the cliff and was gone.

 

********************

Roy was glaring out the window as though the landscape had injured him.

“This town is ugly,” he grumbled, turning away.

Felicity sighed. “You said that about the last fifteen towns we've driven through.” 

“Well, they were all ugly.”

Felicity knew that, before this trip, Central City was the farthest away from home that Roy had ever been. If she had been expecting child-like wonder at the sight of a new world, Roy had other ideas. Nothing thus far – not even the limo ride to a private chartered plane that they had been surprised to find waiting for them, courtesy of Ray, when they left the basement on the morning of their departure – had prompted anything other than bored neutrality. And since getting off of the plane and driving through small outpost towns separated by miles and miles of rough road and wilderness, he had been growing increasingly tense. Felicity had thought that she was a city girl, but she realized that Roy had never been out of sight of skyscrapers before. Compared to him, she was Daniel Boone.

“Some people like trees,” she suggested gently.

“Some people are stupid.”

OK, then. She decided to change the subject. 

“We need to figure out what we're doing. We can take the car for another couple of hundred miles, but then the roads are basically impassable until summer. Usually people would charter a flight or hitch a ride on one of the planes that fly in mail and supplies, but there's really no way to do that without alerting everyone in a thousand miles to our presence. We might not be able to sneak up on the League, but it’s probably not smart to announce our arrival, either. So we can either charter a boat or find another option for going overland – ATVs or horses.”

Roy looked at her, alarmed. “Horses? Like real horses?”

“I thought that would be more effective than metaphorical horses, yeah.” Felicity glanced at his face. “What?”

“Like, cowboy stuff? Isn't that kind of dangerous?”

_Maybe not as dangerous as dressing up and going out every night for hand to hand combat with psychotic villains._ But it was true that neither of them had any riding expertise, and if they were to lose control of the animals... “OK, no horses. With ATVs we might not be able to count on refueling very often, and we could get stranded somewhere. Around here, that means you're really screwed... it's not like you can hitch a ride."

Roy closed his eyes and swallowed, hard, as though the thought of being stranded in the middle of the wilderness had triggered a wave of nausea.

“Got it. Boat it is, then. Basically, we hug the coast for about a hundred miles, then we have to go on foot inland until we get to Baron.”

“Baron?”

“The only town that's remotely close to the coordinates that Oliver left.” Felicity still had the charred slip of paper in her pocket. She had the coordinates memorized, and she had input them into both her laptop and the small handheld GPS she was carrying, but there was something comforting about being able to reach down and touch the paper itself. “From there, there's really no choice but to go on foot to the right spot.” She said it as though she were breaking the news that his puppy had just died, but Roy had grown too absorbed in the problem at hand to notice that she had just proposed weeks of isolation in the wilderness. 

“So what's there? At the coordinates, I mean?” 

“Nothing,” Felicity admitted. “A huge raised plateau in the middle of hundreds of miles of tundra.” She was a little worried about that. What if the coordinates were a red herring? It had occurred to her that the League might have given Oliver false information and then redirected him at the last minute when it was too late to tell anyone. What if they got there and there was no sign of him or the League? 

Almost imperceptibly, she straightened her shoulders. If that happened, they would go to the League stronghold at Nanda Parbat. They wouldn't give up. She had always known that this was a long shot. There was no sense in losing faith now.

“The coordinates are the center of what used to be Kawani territory.” Before Roy could ask, she clarified, “They were the native people who lived in that area. Their population was decimated by disease and territorial encroachments by the colonial government. Then, about fifty years ago, they disappeared completely. No one knows why.”

“Sounds like it could have been the League's work... they're not above killing huge groups of innocent people.”

“Maybe....” Felicity said doubtfully. “I don't understand what the League would have had to gain, though. The land itself isn't valuable – there used to be copper mines there, but they were abandoned a long time ago. Why would the League have bothered with them?” She shrugged and tucked her hair behind her ear where it had escaped the pink bandana. “No sense speculating. We'll know soon enough.” _Unless there's just nothing there._  

“There will be something.” Felicity was getting used to Roy responding to thoughts that she hadn't voiced. This journey was bringing out the same hopes, fears, and worries in each of them. Well, _almost_ the same, Felicity had to admit to herself. She doubted that, in the secret, rare moments that neither of them admitted to – when they allowed themselves to hope that he was still alive – Roy pictured quite the same details that she did.

“Oliver wouldn't have brought us here for nothing.” Roy had fallen into the same habit of thought that Felicity had found herself using – assuming that Oliver had left the coordinates on purpose. It wasn't like Oliver to do anything by accident, but it was possible. What if he had never meant for them to find the coordinates at all?

Looking for a distraction, Felicity touched the button to turn on the radio, but they were far out of distance of any radio towers. As the sound of static filled the car, they hit a pothole that scraped the undercarriage and sent them both bouncing out of their seats. Roy closed his eyes and groaned softly in disgust.

“Cheer up,” said Felicity. She grinned and reached over to punch him lightly on the arm. “It can only get worse.”

 

********************

Oliver's arms were shaking, so he crammed one hand into a crevice and let his weight dangle while he rested. It was painful, but not quite as painful as the cramping in his muscles. When the pain in his hand got to be too much to bear, he would shift his weight back to his muscles and continue to work his way down the sheer face. Trading one kind of pain for another was the best he could hope for, at least until the angle of the wall straightened out.

He squinted upwards, but both the angle and the darkness that had fallen prevented him from following the rope more than a couple of feet up. He just had to hope that Tommy was hanging in at their last relay point. He couldn't tell how much progress they had made; if they were on schedule, they should be almost done with the overhang. He prayed that they were on schedule.

Tommy was a good climber. What little Oliver could see in the darkness had shown him that, while most novice climbers made the mistake of overusing their arms and burning out too soon, Tommy was using the strength of his good arm without depending on it exclusively. Instead, he was trusting his feet to find the almost invisible cracks and crevices, and was using his arm only to draw him close enough to the wall to keep him from losing his footing. Oliver considered that if Tommy did have to cut him loose, he had a fair chance of making it down on his own.

That was not a good thought to have while he was dangling from one arm, his feet swinging loose over more than two thousand feet of empty space. Time to swing back into the wall and resume searching for an outcropping to tie off to.

The swing used the strength of his core to drive him, against the pull of gravity, towards the rock face, where he quickly found rough patches to brace his feet while his other hand sought a hold. Using the strength in his midsection to keep himself from swinging back out, Oliver thought of the endless salmon runs he had done in the basement. He allowed himself a split second to close his eyes and feel himself there again, working his way up and down the rack, Felicity resting her chin on one hand at her desk, keeping an eye on him. Sometimes she chattered about everything and nothing while he worked, and he had never told her that he couldn't make out her words over the clanging of the bars. He didn't want her to stop talking - he loved the sound of her voice, running beneath his workout like a stream. 

Opening his eyes to the cold, silent rock, he found what he was looking for - an outcropping that could take both his weight and a few loops of rope. He swung himself over to it, leaned on it in a way that minimized the amount of energy he was expending, and gave two gentle tugs on the rope. It was taut – Tommy had been feeding it out as Oliver went, doing what he could to take some of the weight of Oliver's climb without throwing him off balance. Now, it went slack as Tommy began his own descent.

It was nerve-wracking, listening to the scuffling sound of the climb, blinded by the darkness and unable to offer help or guide him toward holds. Tommy had been climbing for a few minutes and Oliver was craning his neck upwards, waiting to see the shape above him, when he heard a scrape, a gasp, and a clatter of a small avalanche of stones. Oliver almost lost his own grip as Tommy brushed past him in the dark, free falling, and he braced himself so that when the impact of the rope came he was ready.

Hoping against hope that Tommy had managed to swing back into the wall, Oliver stared into the darkness until it seemed like he would go blind. They had purposely picked a moonless night for their descent so that they wouldn't be spotted against the cliff face. Now, Oliver cursed their foresight. He thought he could make out the outline of Tommy's figure dangling beneath him, but he couldn't tell if it was moving.

The rope was straining, so it was hard to feel if Tommy was trying to send him a message. “ _Tommy,_ ” Oliver hissed, knowing that it was reckless. He didn't know what Tommy's fall might have shaken loose, and his voice reverberated against the bare, smooth rock. But he couldn't do nothing. “Tommy!” 

Then he felt it. Tommy was somehow using the weight of his body to move the rope in jerks, resulting in a slow, painstaking form of communication.

One tug... two... three. Then a long pause.

“Climb up the rope, Tommy. Can you climb?” Oliver wasn't thinking about avalanches. He wasn't thinking about anything but the figure that dangled helplessly below him. _Not again. Please, not again._

The tugs came again. One... two... three. Oliver took that to mean that Tommy was injured in some way, and wouldn't be able to climb.

“OK, just hold on. Hold on, I'll pull you up.” Desperately, Oliver scanned the rock wall with his eyes and hands. Maybe he could hold his own weight with one hand and pull Tommy up with the other, wrapping the rope around the outcrop as he went...

He tried it. With the first pull, his own hand almost slipped. His and Tommy's combined weight was too much for the precarious hold he had found. He managed one wrap around the rock... it immediately slipped back off, sending a jarring snap down the rope. Oliver heard Tommy moan in pain. 

“Hold on, Tommy. I'm going to figure something out, OK? Just hold on.” It was a prayer. _Hold on._ Oliver remembered the moment in the ruins of the building when, helpless, he had watched the light go out in Tommy's eyes. He hauled on the rope, enraged at his own helplessness.   

The tugs came again. _One... two... three..._

“I know, Tommy, I know you're hurt. I'm going to pull you up.” Oliver tried again, and this time, he did slip. He dropped the rope and swung his other hand up to find a hold just in time.

_One...two...three....four._

“No!” _No._ “Hold on!”

_One...two....three...four._ Then a hoarse whisper, floating up from the darkness. “No exceptions. No negotiation.”

“Tommy, _no!”_ Frantic, Oliver began to strain against the rope. This time he got two wraps around the rock before they slipped off. The rope began to quiver. Oliver didn't know what was happening, and then he did. Tommy had a knife, too.

“Tommy, please.” Oliver was whispering, too, not because he was worried about avalanches but because Tommy had whispered, and it was dark, and they couldn't be loud or they would get in trouble. Again, they were boys, huddled in the darkness, whispering about Tommy's mother and Tommy's father, when he was coming back; and when Oliver's father was getting home, and why Oliver's mother seemed so sad. Oliver was sure that if he could just reach down, there would be Tommy, curled up in his sleeping bag. If he could just reach down far enough....

The rope went slack. Oliver heard the soft sound of air as it opened and closed around the falling body; the sharp sound of breaking sticks and falling rocks, and then nothing. 


	2. Chapter 2

They knew that they had reached the town because the road ended. Before them, there was a rocky beach, and then an ocean that stretched endlessly. It was so cold that some of the salt water had frozen on the beach. Felicity got out of the car, slammed the door, and approached the waterline. She wished that she had brought warmer boots – her toes were already growing numb.

She looked up and down the beach. Nothing – no sign of human habitation. Massive evergreens crowded close to the water, leaving a narrow strip of rocks that probably got submerged at high tide. Faced with the impenetrable forest on one side and the hungry ocean on the other, Felicity realized how foolish her idea of back-country travel had been. Clearly the only way that they would be able to continue would be by water.

Behind her, the car door slammed. Roy approached the beach warily, but didn't stop where Felicity did. Instead, he kept going until the waves were lapping at the tips of his beat-up sneakers.

“Roy, that water is freezing!” Felicity fought the urge to grab him and pull him back towards her. She didn't think that he would appreciate the mothering instinct.

As though he hadn't heard her, he leaned over until his fingers were trailing in the water. She bit her lip and refrained from snapping at him that he was going to get frostbite.

When he finally stood up, he turned back to her with a far away look in his eyes. “I've never seen the ocean before,” he said. He turned back to the water and, hunching his shoulders, shoved his hands into his pockets. “My mother always wanted to see the ocean.” His voice was muffled and oddly flat.

Roy never talked about his family. Felicity suddenly felt that they were standing at the edge of a deep chasm. She wasn’t sure how to reach out to him, to steady him, without knocking him over the edge, so she stayed silent. She thought about her own mother. Sometimes, she knew, talking didn’t help.

“Come on,” she said, more abruptly than she meant to. “We've got to find the town. It should be… “ she looked up the beach doubtfully. “Somewhere around here.”

“You all looking for Rocky's?” The voice came from behind her. With a muffled shriek, Felicity whirled around. Her hand automatically went to her belt but she had left the knife, and the bow and arrows, in the car. Damn. She wasn’t very good at this.

Luckily, Roy was. He was in front of Felicity, wielding a pocket knife, before the slight, gray-haired man who had spoken to them had a chance to blink. He backed up several stumbling steps.

 “Whoa!” He put his hands in the air. “Hey son, what do you want? My wallet? I don't have any money but...” He shook his head as his hand went to his back pocket. “Man, it's true what they say about city people... crime rate skyrocketing... can't trust anyone these days....”

As his hand came out of his pocket holding a handful of crumpled receipts and a small notebook, Roy relaxed. “Sorry,” he said gruffly. “You startled us.”

“You... don't want this, then?” The man waved his fistful of detritus at Roy and, behind his glasses, blinked owlishly. Felicity got the impression that he was somewhat disappointed. The feeling was confirmed when he sighed. “Would have been a new story to tell at the pub, anyway.” 

“You have a pub around here?” Roy brightened up.

“Well.... we have Rocky.” He paused. When they didn't show any signs of recognition, he went on. “Rocky. You know... Rocky's?” When they still didn't say anything, he looked baffled. “Oh, come _on._ Everyone knows about Rocky. People come all the way from Rochelle to go to Rocky's!”

“And Rocky's... is a pub.”

The man chuckled slyly. “Well, if you ask the U.S. Government, Rocky is the postmaster. That makes his place the post office, which makes it a government building. Which means that he gets money to maintain it. So... if anyone asks, it's a post office first, pub second, OK?” The man suddenly looked extremely worried, as though he had revealed the details of a high level government conspiracy. “Um... you're not with the government, are you?” He looked doubtfully at Roy's tattered sneakers and Felicity's bright pink bandana. 

“No,” said Felicity gently. “And I promise we won't tell anyone about Rocky, if you can just give us directions to the nearest town.”

He looked puzzled. “What do you mean? You're in the nearest town.”

Roy and Felicity looked up and down the empty beach and the wall of pine. The tide was closing in, and the waterline was approaching. Felicity looked longingly at the car, and then back at the little old man. He smiled at her encouragingly. She wasn't sure what question to ask to clarify the situation – it seemed so self-evident. He clearly thought that it was self-evident, too.

“Do you… is there someone around here who can charter a boat for us?” She asked, uncertainly.

“Oh, sure!”

Felicity thought could see where this was going. “Is it Rocky?”

The man laughed uproariously. “Are you kidding? Rocky's almost 90! He's got no business on boats!”

Felicity spoke slowly and patiently. “But there is somebody who can help us?" 

“Oh, sure, Rocky should be able to take you wherever you need to go. No problem.”

Felicity was still for a very long moment. Then, as she closed her eyes hopelessly, Roy placed his hand on the small of her back, steering her away from the encroaching water.

“Why don't we go to Rocky's and talk about it? We can all have a drink and… talk about it.” He sounded more hopeful than she was feeling right now.

“That is a _great idea,_ ” the man said, earnestly. “You are going to _love_ Rocky's. People come all the way - ”

“From Rochelle. Yeah. So we hear.” As the man turned and started down a path in the forest that Felicity wouldn't have found if she had searched for hours, Roy shrugged at her. “At least we'll get a drink out of it,” he muttered, and took off after the man. With one last lingering look at the car, Felicity followed them into the dark woods.

 

********************

 

“Tommy?” For a few long seconds, there was nothing. Oliver didn't breathe. Then, a quiet moan. 

Without wasting time or breath on speech, Oliver began to work his way down the rock face at a rapid, reckless pace, almost falling from hold to hold. Suddenly, there was ground beneath his feet. 

By the light of the stars, he could see a few feet to either side, and he made out the dark shapes of shrubs and weeds. He was standing on some kind of ledge, at the point where the slope of the wall changed from sloping inward to sloping outward. Carefully, aware that he was standing on the verge of a 2,000 foot drop, he edged towards where he believed the moan had come from. 

It wasn't a miracle, he told himself. When Tommy had fallen, they were already so close to the ledge that it was much more likely that he would land there than continue to plummet. But when Oliver's foot met soft flesh and he heard a faint “Oof,” he felt like dropping to his knees and praying. 

He did drop to his knees, and he fumbled at Tommy's face and upper body, feeling for blood and injuries. Nothing. He was close enough that he could see Tommy's face in the darkness, and saw his friend open his eyes to look back at him.

“You... you...” Tommy was wheezing.

“Hold on.” Oliver braced himself against the cliff wall. The ledge here was thick, at least three feet, so he reached down and pulled Tommy up into a sitting position. Tommy gasped in pain. “What's wrong? Where are you hurt?”

“You... _asshole._ You didn't... cut... the rope!” Tommy was breathless with pain but he forced himself through the sentence. “We... had a… deal!”

“I know. I'm sorry. Where are you hurt?”

“You... made me... cut myself... loose... over thousands of feet! You... son of a bitch!”

“Tommy, we can talk about it later. Tell me where you're hurt.” Oliver's voice was commanding and showed no trace of self-doubt, but he wasn't sure what he would say when they did talk about it. When they made the deal, he had assumed that if Tommy fell, he would be able to pull him to safety. He had only wanted to make sure that Tommy wouldn't sacrifice himself for Oliver's sake, and that if Oliver fell, Tommy would keep going and get a warning to Starling City.

But Oliver hadn't been prepared for the helplessness he had felt as Tommy had dangled below him over what he had believed to be a lethal drop. He would just have to tell Tommy the truth – that he couldn't bear to watch his best friend die twice – and hope that he understood.

Tommy finally consented to have Oliver look at his injuries. The worst of it was a dislocated shoulder – that was what had prevented him from climbing up the rope. Tommy swallowed his cry of pain as Oliver set the shoulder and tied his arm to his chest in a makeshift sling, but his face was gray.

They were only a third of the way through the climb, they were at least an hour behind schedule, and now there was no way that Tommy would be able to use his one remaining arm. But as they sat, shivering, with their legs dangling over a sickening drop, waiting to come up with a plan, Oliver felt an absurd joy bubbling up in his chest. This time, he wasn't running away from his friend's lifeless body. This time there was a happy ending. Maybe only for right now – maybe not so much of an ending – but happy, nonetheless. 

If they tried to spend the rest of the night on the ledge, they would die of exposure, and if they didn't die of exposure, they would die when League scouts found them at sunrise. There was nothing for it but to keep climbing. Now that the climb, though difficult, was down a cliff wall that was slanting outwards, Oliver could lower Tommy to a resting spot and climb down himself to meet him. It wasn't a perfect system and earlier tonight it would have seemed impossible. But they had already done the impossible tonight, and they had both survived it. This, Oliver considered, bracing himself to lower his friend, was just an invigorating challenge.

Their boots touched ground just moments before sunrise. Stumbling, exhausted, and triumphant, they hugged the cliff's face until they found a shallow cave, hung up a deerskin in front of it for shelter and camouflage, and barely had time to lay out a few more skins to cover the ground and themselves before sleep overtook them.

 

********************

 

The little man, who identified himself as Lou, had told them that Rocky's was “just down the road.” Felicity wasn't sure how that was possible, since there was clearly no road, but she was trying to give him the benefit of the doubt.

Sheltered from the wind by the thick forest, and moving along at a brisk pace – he may not have been young, but Lou was in excellent shape – Felicity could feel the blood returning to her numb extremities. She began to worry about the equipment she had brought. Top-dollar “performance fabric” didn't seemed to be holding up to the raw sub-arctic cold as well as she had hoped. Roy was in even worse shape than she was – he had covered up his habitual jeans and hoodie with a heavy winter coat that Felicity had bought him at the last minute, but she couldn't imagine that it would be sufficient for the conditions that they would be facing. 

In front of her, Lou came to a sudden halt. Roy ran into her from behind and the three of them collided as Lou spread out his arms, as though offering them the Taj Mahal.

“Here it is,” he said, proudly. “Downtown.”

They were standing on the edge of a big, muddy clearing. In the center of the clearing was a rambling old wooden building that looked like it would come tumbling down at the first hint of a breeze. Behind it, huddled against the edge of the forest, were a handful of smaller structures that didn't look like they were in any better shape. In front of a couple of the buildings were a couple of pickup trucks and smaller vehicles, all looking as dilapidated as the buildings. Felicity couldn't imagine what their purpose was, since the only possibility of a road – a narrow outlet on one end of the clearing – was hopelessly blocked with brush and lumber.

Lou looked disappointed at their lack of a reaction but pushed on. “It's just as well that you missed the turn-off... the road is really only passable for about a month in the summer. The rest of the time Rocky flies the supplies in and out in his biplane.” He nodded at an aircraft so small that Felicity had at first dismissed it as a toy. It was in no better shape than the trucks. Just the thought of getting it off the ground made Felicity's stomach lurch.

Roy seemed oddly unfazed, as though he had already gone through so much culture shock that nothing could surprise him anymore. He nodded towards the main building. “Rocky's?”

Lou grinned proudly. “Just wait til they meet you.” He started towards the building, with Felicity and Roy in tow. “Things get pretty busy around here in the summer – tourist trade, you know, last year we had _7 people_ come through here – but we _never_ get visitors this time of year. I don't mind telling you, we get a touch of cabin fever out here now and then.” 

“You don't say,” said Felicity, flatly.

She was expecting the inside of the building to be in as rough shape as the outside, and was pleasantly surprised when Lou opened the door to a large, comfortable salon, lit and warmed by a roaring fire. The furniture consisted of a few over-stuffed chairs, a massive sofa, and an old rocking chair near the fire. At the end of the room opposite the fire was an old, worn bar that had been erected in front of a wall of PO boxes that looked like they hadn’t been used in fifty years. Behind the bar, a pleasant-looking middle-aged man watched a small TV that was propped in front of the boxes. Several of the chairs were inhabited, and the rocking chair was being used by an ancient-looking man who was nodding his head and smiling gently gently to himself, as though in response to an amusing story that only he could hear.

Roy entered after Lou, and held the door for Felicity. Every head in the room swung towards them – she felt like the interloper in an old western. Voices stilled. Slowly, the man behind the door reached over, picked up a remote, and turned the TV off. The only sound in the room  that remained was the crackling of the fire and an occasional chuckle from the old man, the only person not staring at the newcomers.

Lou beamed proudly, as though he had personally conjured Roy and Felicity out of thin air.

“Who's this, Lou?” A young man stood up and made his approach. He held out his hand to Felicity and then, as if as an afterthought, to Roy. He was slightly taller than the latter, and broader in the shoulders, and Felicity noticed that Roy stood up a little straighter and saw the other man wince at the strength of his handshake. She shot a warning glance at Roy, and he looked slightly sheepish.

“These,” said Lou portentously, “are my _friends.”_

The young man looked doubtful, but turned back to Felicity. “I'm Rocky,” he said.

She looked him up and down. He couldn't have been older than 25, and he was clearly in the prime of health. His chestnut hair gleamed in the firelight, and when he smiled at her, a deep dimple appeared in his left cheek. His eyes were the chilly, clear blue of an arctic winter. _Oh, my._

“You,” she said fervently, “look _great_ for your age.” He looked slightly confused but smiled more broadly.

Roy cleared his throat. “We heard that you were 90.”

Rocky threw back his head with a shout of laughter, and then patted Lou on the shoulder. The older man winced slightly at the force of the friendly gesture. “You've been confusing our guests, Lou.” He turned back to Felicity, again speaking to her as if Roy wasn't there. “I'm Rocky, the third. That's my dad, Rocky Junior.” He nodded towards the bar, where the man behind the counter beamed at them in silent good humor. “And that,” pointing to the beaming, chuckling old man in the rocking chair, “is Rocky.”

“The postmaster,” said Felicity.

“The postmaster,” agreed Rocky. His face clouded. “Hey, you're not with the government, are you?”

“Yeah,” said Roy, clearly annoyed at being disregarded. “We're official inspectors of small-scale post office fraud. Ass-end-of-nowhere division. 

Rocky grinned and clapped Roy on the back, causing the latter to stagger forward a few steps. “Great! You’re in the right place, then. C’mon, I’ll buy you a beer.”

Without waiting for an answer, he settled in at the bar. Felicity did the same, and Roy followed, glowering. The man behind the counter filled three pint glasses with amber liquid.

“So,” said Roy, looking at the youngest Rocky, who was looking at Felicity. “Any chance of getting answers to a few questions? Or do I need to be blond and grow -” at Felicity's glare, he stopped himself. “... a ponytail?”

To her surprise, a deep blush spread over Rocky's cheeks. “Oh, geez. I'm sorry.”

“No, I'm sorry,” said Felicity. To her horror, she felt her own cheeks grow pink. “My friend is being rude.” Again, she glared at Roy, who again looked slightly ashamed.

“She's right,” admitted Roy. “Sorry, man. I'm sure it's not every day you get pretty girls in here. I just... I'm in a bad mood, you know? It was a rough road getting here.”

Rocky looked back up at Roy, but he avoided Felicity's gaze and his ears were still pink. “Oh, hey, don't worry about it. I didn't mean to stare.” His nod encompassed both of them. “You're right, though, we don't get many newcomers, and when we do, they're not usually... like you.” The blush began again.

Lou had settled in by the fireplace and was recounting, with relish, his adventure on the beach. Felicity cleared her throat, desperate to change the subject.

“Lou said that Rocky might be able to charter us a boat. Is that you?”

Rocky brightened. “Yes, ma'am! I'm your man.”

“You certainly are.” Roy muttered, and took another swig of his beer. “So you do the boat, your father does the bar... does anyone actually do the mail?”

“My grandfather is the postmaster.” There was a stubborn set to Rocky's jaw.

Roy looked thoughtful. “Yes, but... how do I put this? I understand that he....”

“ _Oversees_ the mail,” Felicity offered.

“Right. But who actually, you know, collects and delivers it?”

“Oh,” Rocky said breezily, “we all take a turn.”

Roy nodded. “Sounds fool-proof. So if I wanted to get a letter sent, who would I give it to?”

Rocky raised his eyebrows. “You came all the way out here just to mail a letter?”

“Humor me.”

“I guess it'd probably be best to give it to Dad. He usually collects the letters until someone's ready to take the plane up.” Rocky nodded at a stack of sticky, beer-stained envelopes currently being used as a coaster for Rocky, Jr.'s beer. 

“Swell,” Roy muttered. 

Felicity took a long sip of her own beer. “Rocky, we're trying to get to Baron. Can you help us?” 

Rocky frowned. “What do you want to go to Baron for? That place is the middle of nowhere.”

Roy snorted, choking on his beer, and Rocky looked down, his ears turning pink again. “I know we don’t seem like much, but compared to Baron… Why would you want to head up there this time of year? It’s way too early for hunting.” 

“We're grad students. I'm a forensic anthropologist and Roy is a social historian.” Felicity was pleased with herself for coming up with this cover story on the long car ride, while Roy had been sulking. “We're doing research on the Kawani... you know, looking for traces of their civilization, trying to understand what happened to them. We understand that Baron is the closest town to their old territory.”

Rocky brightened. “You're interested in the Kawani? Oh, you have to talk to Grandpa. He's one half Kawani. On his mother’s side.”

“Really?” Felicity feigned enthusiasm, but her heart sank. Her clever cover story had just bought her an evening chatting with a senile old man, when what she really wanted to be doing was planning the next leg of the trip. “That would be great,” she said, weakly. 

Eager to please, Rocky insisted on introducing her as soon as they had sorted out the details of their trip. They would leave at daybreak the next day, and that night she and Roy would stay at Rocky’s, which was evidently also “the best bed and breakfast this side of Rochelle.” Felicity was increasingly glad that that their journey hadn’t required a trip to Rochelle. 

As he guided her to the rocking chair by the fire, Rocky leaned his head down so that his lips were close to her ear. “So…. you and Roy. You’re…?” He left the sentence unfinished and, again, his cheeks turned pink.

“Oh! No.” Felicity wasn’t sure where to go from there - she didn’t have a lot of experience letting people down gently. “But I’m kind of with… well, we’re not together, but when I get home - and even that’s only if I can kind of move on from… “ She trailed off hopelessly. “You seem like a really nice guy.”

He nodded, as though she had said something that had made sense. “And Roy? Is he… you know… available?”

“Oh.” Felicity frowned, puzzled, and then understanding dawned. “ _Oh._ Um… it’s complicated. Like, really complicated. But I guess I’d have to say… no, not really.”

“Gotcha.” Rocky sighed, and then gave Felicity a shy, but communicative, smile.

Felicity patted him on the back. “Story of your life?”  

“Actually, I do OK. You might be surprised how many big-game hunters are gay. Or at least…. flexible.” Rocky lifted one shoulder in a gesture of futility. “The problem is getting them to stay when the season’s over.”

“Well,” said Felicity, “If you ever want to commiserate about unavailable men, I am definitely your girl.”

“Your friend?” Rocky looked interested. Felicity wondered if he was maintaining hope in Roy’s flexibility.

“God, no. When he falls, he falls _hard._ We are talking full-on, all systems go, emotional commitment. Which, so far, has outlasted the relationship by about a year,” Felicity added.

Rocky looked at Roy, wistfully, then turned back to Felicity.

“Your guy at home, then?”

“No, he’s available. _Very_ available. Maybe a little too available.” Felicity hastened to correct herself. “I mean, actually, he’s the perfect amount of available. It might be _my_ availability that’s the problem.”

Rocky nodded, comprehendingly. “Ah. So we’re talking about the one who got away.” 

“Very far away,” Felicity agreed, softly. Rocky looked away to give her a moment of privacy as, suddenly, her eyes filled with tears that she quickly blinked blinked back.

“You’ll have to tell me about him sometime.” Rocky spoke lightly and, sensing that now wasn’t that time, resumed his movement to the other end of the room. As they approached the rocking chair, he nodded towards the old man.  

“Ask him anything. You might not be able to get much sense out of him, but he likes when people take an interest. His mom grew up Kawani and came here after she got married. Not many people left who remember much about them, but Grandpa’s got some stories when he’s feeling sharp.”

Felicity had hoped that talking about his love life - which she would have found much more compelling than a sociology lesson about an extinct tribe - would distract Rocky from his mission. Since it clearly hadn’t, she plastered a look of keen interest on her face and scanned the room. Roy was sitting at the bar, scribbling furiously in an old notebook he’d gotten from Rocky. The bar had cleared out as the rest of the inhabitants had recovered from the excitement of the newcomers and returned to their homes, either in the outbuildings or in cabins off in the woods behind the clearing. Lou was the only one left, hunched at the bar, regaling Rocky II with his adventures of the day. Felicity heard the words “pistol” and “ducked a punch,” and wondered how many iterations the story had to go before she and Roy were storming the beach from a nuclear submarine.

Rocky settled her in a chair with another beer and then addressed his grandfather, speaking in a slow, clear voice. “This is Felicity, Grandpa. She’s doing research on the Kawani. I told her you know all about the Kawani. Right?”

The old man blinked at Felicity, then his grandson, and then turned back to Felicity. He smiled, apparently pleased, but she wasn’t sure how much he understood. He leaned toward Felicity as though about to share a secret.

“Do you know… how old I am?” Before she could reply, he went on. “Ninety-four years old.” His old face cracked into a broad grin and he began to chuckle again. “I’m a goddamned baby. A 94-year-old baby.”

Rocky shook his head sadly. “Sorry,” he whispered to Felicity. “This isn’t one of his good days.”

The old man glared at him. “I don’t have good days, you little bastard. I have days when I’m still alive. That’s all you get when you’re 94 goddamned years old.” 

Rocky looked abashed. “Sorry, Grandpa. I thought…”

“You thought you could talk around me. I know. You all think you can talk around me.” Felicity shifted uncomfortably, but he smiled at her. “Sorry, miss. Didn’t mean to scare you. I just don’t have a lot of patience these days. My grandson’s a good boy, but…. “ He turned back to Rocky. “This your girlfriend? You finally got yourself a girlfriend?”

There was that blush again. “ _No,_ Grandpa. I just met her. I told you, she’s here to study the Kawani.”

The old man sighed. He peered at Felicity. “Hopeless. I work my whole life to support my family and it’s going to end with this damn kid because he can’t have a conversation with a girl.” He nodded at Rocky. “Go get my things.”

“Your box, you mean?”

“What do you think I mean? What other things do I have? _Yes,_ I mean my box.” He rolled his eyes at Rocky, and then, when the younger man had turned away, muttered to Felicity. “My pride and joy, that boy.” He cast a critical eye on her fleece leggings and messy ponytail. “Fruity as an apple tree, so don’t get your hopes up.” At the look of surprise on her face, he grinned. “He doesn’t want me to know. So I don’t know.” He winked, a surprisingly sly gesture from a man who had seemed to be weaving in and out of consciousness minutes before. Then he leaned his head back and closed his eyes. Felicity thought that he had gone to sleep until, softly, he began to sing. The words were in a language she had never heard, but the tune was soothing and she let her own head tip back and her eyes drift close as she listened.

Suddenly, the old man clutched her arm. Her eyes flew open as he struggled to sit up straight in his chair and draw himself closer to her. He repeated the words with more urgency. “Kay-lac kay-lac pol min, kay-lac kay-lac pol mat… _kay-lac mat sune vid sune.”_

“Are you OK?” Felicity looked around for Rocky or his father but no one was watching.

“Do you know what that means? It is an old song. An old song about the story of the hunter.” His eyes, suddenly clear, met hers knowingly. “You know the story of the hunter?” 

“I don’t know… any hunters.” This man knew nothing about her. He was rambling. _Then why is my heart pounding?_ “What does the song mean?”

“Ha!” The old man was grinning again. “You lie to me, I lie to you. Too bad. The song tells how the story ends. Do _you_ know how the story ends?” His voice raised in a triumphant shout, but the others in the room ignored him. 

She shook her head, slowly, and he laughed. “Foolish girl. Never start a story if you don’t know how it ends.” He looked over her shoulder, where Rocky was coming back down the stairs, holding what looked like a wooden jewelry box. “Here we are. Come here, boy.”

Rocky placed the box gently on the old man’s lap. It opened on a jumble of photographs and yellow papers. Rocky the elder pushed the papers aside, handing some of them to Felicity with an affected carelessness, but she could tell from the way he watched out of the corner of his eye that he wanted her to look at them.

Most were photographs of a girl. A woman, really - younger than Felicity but old enough, according to the pictures, to be married with children. In one of the photographs she was standing next to a handsome young man with a broad grin and a dimple in one cheek. He could have been Rocky’s twin. Next to the young woman, who was also smiling, was another beautiful woman, slightly older and wearing a shift, leggings, and leather cuffs around her arm as jewelry. She was glowering at the camera.

One was a letter. It was yellowed and faded and couldn’t be unfolded without cracking the paper, but Felicity could make out the words “come home,” “our land,” and “weeping.” Felicity averted her eyes. She felt as though she was eavesdropping across generations.     

Finally, the old man found what he was looking for. He held it up triumphantly - an old leather cuff, like that which the woman was wearing in the picture. He tossed it on top of the stack of papers in Felicity’s lap. Despite its obvious age, it was buttery smooth and gleamed a rich caramel color. It was decorated with row after row of close, tiny pictograms inscribed on the outside. On the inside - the side that would face that would face the wrist when the cuff was worn - there was an unexpectedly simple portrayal of a few constellations. Felicity didn’t look at them closely, but she recognized the unmistakable shape of Orion’s shield.

“Ha!” He crowed. “Bet you haven’t seen many of _those._ ”

Felicity tried to look impressed. “I certainly haven’t!”

He peered into her face and, after a moment, his own face fell. Without turning his head, he spoke to his grandson. “I’m gonna need a beer.” When the young man had left, the elder Rocky leaned in and hissed at Felicity. “You know nothing of the Kawani. You are not who you say you are. How about you tell me what you’re really doing here, before I tell my grandson you’re a liar?”


	3. Chapter 3

When Oliver awoke, Tommy was already sitting up, silhouetted against the rich glow of the setting sun.

“You should have woken me up,” he said, his voice rough with sleep. “We could have gotten moving - this whole side of the cliff is in shadow.”

Tommy shrugged without looking at him. “You did most of the work on the way down. I figured it was only fair to let you rest.”

Oliver felt oddly annoyed. He didn’t like being coddled. “Well, don’t,” he said, more sharply than he intended. “We need to move faster than this. We don’t have time to ‘let me rest.’”

“Suit yourself.” Tommy’s voice was chilly, and as they set about breaking down and packing up their camp, they hardly spoke. The euphoria of survival had drained away. Oliver felt chilled from the long sleep and he had wrenched his left shoulder in his desperation to pull Tommy up. He shrugged irritably as it twinged under the weight of his pack.

They didn’t take time to make a fire, but they had steeped some of the algae in cold water while they slept, and they both drank a few gulps of the foul-tasting tonic. It helped with the chill and the ache, but not with the cloud of depression that seemed to have fallen over them.

As they ducked out of the cave, the sun was casting its last furtive rays over the horizon and the snow was beginning to glow blue in the twilight. Oliver wondered what would happen to this landscape if the world found out about the fountain of youth that ran just beneath the surface.

They walked in silence for hours as the stars emerged and the new moon rose. Its reflection on the snow cast such light that Oliver worried that their dark shapes moving like shadows across the tundra would be too easy to see, but there was no sign of the League anywhere. An occasional far-off howl testified to their encroachment in wolf territory, but the wolves took no more interest in their trespass than did the moon or the snow.

Gradually, Oliver’s mood lifted. Walking helped. Even knowing that this was the first day of weeks that they would spend this way - walking for hours on end and feeling no closer to their destination - being on the move was always better than sitting still. But when he looked behind him to make sure that Tommy was keeping up or to say something about their direction, Tommy’s gaze was always on the ground.

Finally, as though he could no longer bear the weight of a thought that he had been carrying all night, Tommy blurted out, “Do you feel sorry for me? Is that it?”

“...What?” Oliver was genuinely surprised. “No. Why should I feel sorry for you?”

“Or do you feel guilty? Because you couldn’t save me during the earthquake?”

“I did feel guilty about that, yeah. But I guess it’s started to seem like kind of a moot point…”

“Why didn’t you cut the rope, then?”

Oh. That was what Tommy had been stewing about all night.

“You’re supposed to be this great warrior, right? You’ve killed a lot of people, Oliver.” Tommy’s voice was shaking. “So why not me? Why couldn’t you do it? You jeopardized everything, man. If we had both died… what is it about me? You can fire an arrow into someone’s heart without a second thought. Then, you chose last night to suddenly grow a conscience?”

Oliver’s thought about the four tugs, about the voice inside of him screaming that this time, he couldn’t let Tommy go. How could he explain that to a man who thought that he was a ruthless killer?

He swallowed. “Tommy…. I ran away from you once when I thought you were already dead. It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do. I just… couldn’t do it again. I’m sorry. Maybe that was the wrong choice, but it was too hard.”

The anger had receded from Tommy’s voice, but Oliver couldn’t read his tone. “You used to be the guy who _made_ hard choices, Oliver. I didn’t agree with them, but you made them, and you didn’t look back. What happened?" 

Oliver stopped and turned. In the moonlight, Tommy’s eyes looked wounded and bewildered.

“ _You_ happened,” said Oliver. He held Tommy’s gaze for a long moment, but the other man didn’t speak or move a muscle.  “After you died, I just kept thinking - how did I become someone that you saw as a killer? Someone that my best friend was so - _disgusted_ with?”

Tommy looked abashed. “Oliver, I know I didn’t agree with your methods, but I didn’t really think that…”

“Yeah, you did. And you were right. Tommy, I’d gone so far down that road that I didn’t think twice about killing. Sometimes my reasons may have been good, but sometimes... I killed when I had other options. I was losing myself, and I _was_ becoming a murderer. I was becoming the kind of man that I had dedicated myself to stopping. So...” Oliver shrugged. “I stopped killing.”

Startled, Tommy ran one hand over the beard that had started to grow since they’d left the mine. “You gave up the Hood?”

“No. I gave up killing. I still catch the bad guys - now I just turn them over to Detective Lance.”

“Laurel’s dad?” Now Tommy looked truly shocked.

“Yeah, he’s… kind of come around to my way of thinking about some things.” 

Tommy shook his head slowly as he processed this. “Of course. All I wanted to do was date his daughter, and he tried to have me arrested for murder. You embrace vigilante justice and terrorize half the city, and he probably wants to take you fishing and call you the son he never had.”

Oliver grinned. “Sorry, man. I can’t help it if parents like me. I’m charming.”

Tommy scowled at him but, as he swung his pack back onto his shoulders and began to move again, he seemed to walk more lightly. “So you don’t kill at all anymore? Because of me?” Beneath the careful neutrality in his town, Oliver thought that he sounded pleased.

Oliver closed his eyes, briefly. “Only once. When there was no other choice.” _The needle at her neck… the soft sound of the arrows finding their target._ “Even Slade - the man who killed my mother in front of me. I had the chance to take him out, but he’s rotting away in a prison cell, going insane.” 

Oliver realized, a beat too late, that Tommy didn’t yet know about Moira’s death. Even as he drew a breath to break the shocked silence, Tommy turned to face him, his face gray and ashen. 

“The man who _what?_ ”

********************

 

“Wait,” Felicity said urgently. “Please don’t say anything… please. I can explain.”

The old man raised his eyebrows skeptically but, when his grandson deposited his beer in front of him, he didn’t say anything other than, “Now _she_ needs another beer.”

Rocky looked at Felicity’s still-full glass and grinned. “Ah. I guess you two must be getting along,” he said, turning away to head back to the bar.

“Thank you,” Felicity breathed out. She supposed she could have come clean to the youngest Rocky, but she wasn’t sure that he would be as willing to help them if he knew that he was dropping them off in the middle of the wilderness to risk battle with an ancient league of super-assassins. He seemed like the kind of guy who might have some reservations about that sort of thing. “OK, you’re right. I don’t know anything about the Kawani, except that where we’re headed is their territory…” She took a deep breath. “And we’re headed there because it’s the last known location of a friend of ours who’s gone missing.” 

“And you decided to come looking for him yourself instead of alerting the authorities. Missy, I may be old, but I’m not stupid. What’s really going on?”

“That’s what’s really going on! I _swear._ We can’t tell the authorities because… because we can’t. But sir, I promise, that’s all there is to it. We’re just going to look for our friend.”

Rocky Sr. was silent for a long moment. Felicity’s heart was in her throat as she rehearsed excuses for Rocky III.

The old man closed his eyes again, and she remembered Rocky implying that his mind wandered…. she hoped that it was true. Maybe the conversation was over. Maybe he had gone to sleep and when he woke up he wouldn’t remember any of this.

He hadn’t fallen asleep. When he spoke again, his voice had lost its crass, irritable edge. Instead it was soft, almost dreamy.

“My brother and I fought in World War II, you know.”

“Yes?” Felicity kept her own voice soft, careful not interrupt his revery.

“We fought together. They didn’t usually do that - keep brothers together. They were afraid that, in a pinch, you’d do right by your brother instead of your squad. But we were twins, and I guess the guys in charge must have been feeling nice that day, because we got shipped out together.” Felicity held her breath. Maybe if she waited out the story he would drift off…

“We were in Italy. Beautiful country. Loaded with landmines. I got caught in a blast, lost the hearing in one ear, got sent home. Got a letter a month later that he was missing, presumed dead. That they weren’t looking for him.”

“I’m sorry,” said Felicity, softly.

He looked up at her, sharply, and she wondered if he had broken the spell. But he went on. “Thing is - the week before I left, he got into trouble. Got caught, you see. I’d been covering for him but… I’d known my whole life. How he was. And when he and one of the other boys in the squad...” He trailed off and his eyes fluttered closed, briefly, and then snapped back open. “The other boy ran off. My brother would have gone too, but he didn’t want to leave me alone.” His face was dark. “I don’t know what happened, but I know they sure didn’t work too hard to get him home. And by the time the war was over - by the time I could go after him - it was too late.” He smiled bitterly. “Army wouldn’t even give our mother his benefits. Claimed he must have died in an attempt to go AWOL.” He was silent for a long moment. “So my brother is still in Italy. No grave. No marker. No nothing. All because of who he loved.” Unflinching, he held Felicity’s gaze. “What I’m saying is, I know a little something about how some people get lost and don’t get looked for. And I tell you what, I would have given a lot to bring him home. I would _still_ give a lot to bring him home.”

A long, heavy silence descended. Knowing that it was selfish, Felicity wished that the old man _had_ drifted off to sleep. She didn’t want to know about the half-century old tragedy. She had enough of her own grief to carry.

Rocky returned with Felicity’s beer. “You two getting along alright? Grandpa, are you scaring this nice girl?” He shot a questioning look at Felicity, but she shook her head and smiled tightly.

Rocky Sr. held Felicity’s gaze for a few seconds and then, with a long sigh, sat back and took the beer from his grandson so that he was holding one in each hand. “Old age always scares youth. This girl knows a whole lot about the Kawani, boy. I’ve never met anyone so interested in our history. As a matter of fact, I was just about to give her this. For her project.” He picked up the leather cuff again and handed it to Felicity. “This was my mother’s.” 

Felicity held up her hands, as if the bracelet were a weapon. “Oh no, I couldn’t take something so valuable.” 

“It’s worthless. Couldn’t get a dime for it.”

“No, I mean - priceless. It’s an heirloom. More than that - an artifact. From a lost civilization.” 

The old man waggled his head back and forth, as though weighing a thought. “Maybe. Then again, like we were just saying, sometimes lost isn’t as clear as it seems. Sometimes something gets lost on purpose… sometimes it doesn’t get lost at all. Besides, you’re in the story now. The bracelet shows the song. The song knows the ending. How are you going to get to the ending without the map to the song?” Again, the old man’s voice grew soft as he leaned back and closed his eyes. This time, his breathing became even and his hand relaxed and opened, dropping the bracelet into Felicity’s lap.

“I would take it, if I were you,” whispered Rocky. “He wouldn’t give it to you if he didn’t mean it.”

“It belongs to your family,” Felicity whispered back. “Besides, what if he wakes up and forgets he’s given it to me?” But Rocky was shaking his head.

“It’s his to give. And he doesn’t forget that kind of thing. What day it is, maybe. Not the pretty girl he gave his mother’s bracelet to.” He clapped his hands on his knees and stood up, offering his hand to pull Felicity up as well. Clearly, he considered the matter closed. “So. Did you learn anything?”

“I think so,” said Felicity. _I just have no idea what it is._

 

********************

 

It was freezing, but they were in the middle of the open tundra, and there was no way to have a fire without advertising their presence. Tommy sat, shivering, staring at his clenched hand in his lap.

“I’m so sorry, man. I’m so, so sorry.” When he looked up to meet Oliver’s gaze, there were tears in his eyes.

“Shit, Tommy, _I’m_ sorry. I forgot that you didn’t know. I should never have told you like that.”

Tommy roughly drew his hand down across his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose, but when he opened his eyes again, they were dry. “I can’t believe you didn’t kill him. _I_ would have killed him.”

“I wanted to. But believe me, shutting him in a cell with his demons wasn’t the soft option. And besides…” Oliver looked down, and his hair, which had grown in these past several weeks, fell in front of his eyes, shielding his face from Tommy’s gaze. “The reason he killed my mother was because he thought that I had killed someone he loved. Tommy, when I was the Hood, I had my reasons for killing. Good reasons. Monsters usually do. But at the end of the day, those reasons aren’t enough to turn them back into men. And once you’ve crossed that line, if you’ll kill for a good reason, you’ll kill for a bad one. That’s the whole point, Tommy. That’s what you showed me. If I’m going to stop these people, there needs to be something that separates me from them.”

Tommy still looked unconvinced. “Look,” Oliver was still crouching before Tommy, the positions they had taken up when Tommy, shocked by the news of Moira’s death, had dropped his pack and fallen heavily to his knees. “He was my friend. He taught me a lot. Killing him wouldn’t have solved anything. This way… maybe, someday, he’ll be himself again.”

“And you would forgive him?”

Oliver was silent for a long moment, wondering how to explain what he owed Slade - not just because of their friendship but because Oliver saw, in the other man, what he himself could have become. If Digg and Felicity hadn’t come into his life to save him so that he could save the city; if Thea hadn’t believed in him when he couldn’t believe in himself; if Tommy hadn’t been there to show him what he was becoming… He wanted, desperately, to explain to Tommy that the reason he needed to give Slade a second chance was because he didn’t know what he, Oliver, would have become without one.

But did that mean forgiveness?

“No… I don’t know. I can’t imagine it. But where there’s life, there’s hope, right?” He stood up and reached his hand out to Tommy. “You changed me. So did he, a long time ago. Who knows what changes are coming?” 

Tommy took Oliver’s hand and let himself be pulled to his feet. “That,” he said, “is the _least_ Oliver Queen thing I’ve ever heard you say.” 

Oliver rolled his eyes and helped him on with his pack. “Thanks.”

As they started forward again, Tommy grew serious. “Hey… I’m sorry I wasn’t there.”

“What?” Oliver scanned the sky. Orion was hovering over the horizon straight ahead of them, confirming that they were headed due east.

“When _my_ mom died, you were there.” 

“Tommy. You weren’t exactly on vacation. You would have been there if you could.”

“Yeah but… still. I’m sorry. I’m sorry I haven’t been there for all of it. Even your stupid love life drama.”

Oliver grinned at the sky and gestured in the direction they were headed. Tommy followed where he was pointing. “Cheer up. You can be there for the next chapter, when she chooses Ray and I get drunk for a month.”

“Who the hell is Ray?”

Oliver began to explain - all of it. Not just about Ray, but about Felicity, and how finding her had felt so natural and so miraculous, as if the world had saved her up for the moment when he needed her the most. How he might have lost her because he was so scared of losing her. Everything he would have told Tommy in the old days, before the earthquake, before the Hood. Before the island. In the bright arctic night, their voices wove together, rose in laughter, and finally lapsed into silence as the great hunter rose over the tundra, and they made their way by his light.


	4. Chapter 4

The sky was barely lightening when they stepped into the boat the next morning. It was smaller than Felicity had pictured - really just a dinghy with an onboard motor. Rocky had explained that they would need to pilot the boat close to shore, barely beyond the breakers, because if they got out any farther the current became too strong for the small boat to navigate.

Before leaving Rocky’s - where they had come down from the only guestroom to find an elaborate breakfast, served by the silent and beaming Rocky, Jr. - the youngest Rocky had cast a critical eye on their gear.

“Hang on,” he said, disappearing upstairs. When he came back down he had an armload of fur and sealskin.

“It’s a lot heavier than the stuff you have,” he said. “But on the plus side, it actually works.”

Felicity kept her lightweight wool and fleece and selected a fur-lined overcoat and boots to wear in addition. Roy traded in his jeans and sneakers for coarse wool and leather boots with fur lining. He kept the sweatshirt and the heavy coat, but acceded to a fur scarf and fur-lined hat with ear-flaps that made him look like Elmer Fudd. He glared at Felicity as if daring her to comment.

Rocky also insisted on depositing several fur-lined blankets in their packs. Felicity tried to pay him for the gear but he wouldn’t hear of it. He suggested that she simply return it after the trip, and when she gently told him that she wasn’t sure if or when they would be back, he just smiled shyly and said that he would take his chances. Roy rolled his eyes, but Felicity had the feeling that Rocky was winning him over.

Before leaving, Roy slid a slim envelope across the bar to Rocky Jr., who nodded and added it to his stack. Felicity didn’t need to see the address to know where it was headed. She wondered what he had decided to tell Thea about where they were headed. Maybe nothing - maybe the letter was just to tell her what he needed her to know in case they didn’t come back. 

It took them three days to make it up the coast. During the day, they huddled in their seal-skins, trying to keep their backs to the onslaught of frigid ocean spray. At night, Rocky dragged the boat ashore and drew more sealskin over its top, shielding them from the cold. They curled up together inside, an intimacy as matter-of-fact as that which drove any animal to seek comfort in communal warmth.

By the third day, when Rocky hauled the boat onto the beach and Felicity hopped out and started her habitual search for firewood, she realized that none of them had spoken out loud since that morning. It was easier to communicate by gestures than to try to shout over the buzz of the motor and the constant rush of waves, and eventually they had begun to understand one another without using words. 

So she was startled when, as night started to fall and she and Roy drew close around the fire that Rocky had started, the latter spoke. 

“Baron is 75 miles that way,” he said, gesturing inland with his chin. “Due east.” 

“Oh,” said Felicity, feeling oddly deflated. This beach looked no different than the one they had left from. The forest was equally impenetrable, the ocean equally threatening. She had allowed herself to be lulled by the rhythm of their survival - wake, eat, travel, eat, sleep - into forgetting that the most difficult part of their journey still lay ahead. And they were losing their guide. The thought of Rocky turning back while they went on without his easy competence and guileless optimism made her feel, suddenly, very lonely.

Again reading her mind, Roy spoke up. “We’re gonna miss you, man,” he said, earnestly. “Sure you don’t feel like taking a trip to Baron with us?”

Felicity grinned when Rocky’s cheeks flooded with color. He cleared his throat. “Actually, I do need to go to Baron. They got a message to us a few days ago that they’re running low on some stuff - coffee, tea. Whisky. I figured, long as I’m here, I might was well pack in enough to stretch to their next big drop.” He nodded towards his pack, which he so far hadn’t removed from the boat.

“So you’re going with us?”

“If you want to go to Baron. Thing is, I was thinking - you’re going to the Kawani plateau, right? That’s where you need to do your… research?”

The pause before the word made Felicity wonder if his grandfather had said anything to him about their real intentions. “That’s right. It’s just a couple weeks’ hike from Baron, right?”

“If you keep up a good pace, yeah. But this is a bad time of year to be out hiking in the tundra…. the weather is really unpredictable in April and May. You can get sudden thaws and sudden storms, right on top of each other. Once you’re at the plateau you might be able to use one of the abandoned buildings, or at least dig in and make yourself a shelter, but the spring is dangerous for travel.” Rocky tactfully refrained from asking them why they had chosen the worst possible season for their visit. He chewed his lower lip thoughtfully, his brows drawn down in concern. “If it were me, I wouldn’t waste time going to Baron first. They’re pretty short on supplies after the winter, anyway. You’re better off using what you’ve got, hunting to supplement, and heading right for the plateau.”

Felicity shook her head. “According to the maps, that’s not possible. We’d have to head straight north from here and then cut a few miles inland. But just before the turn east, there’s a massive inlet that’s impassable. It would take us about 20 miles out of our way to get around it.”

“It’s only impassable in the summer. That’s when most of the tourists come - that’s why they take off from Baron when they head into old Kawani territory. But we’ve had a cold spring so far, and the winter turns that inlet into solid ice. We’re not due for thaw weather for another couple weeks - if you hurry, you should just about make it.”

Felicity’s heart lifted. If it was true, it meant cutting at least a week off of their travel time, and going by the beach -- which, while cold, was marginally less intimidating than the woods.

“You’re sure that’s safe?” Roy looked worried. Felicity had to admit that crossing ice floes at the cusp of the thaw might not be the wisest option.

“Hell no, man. None of this is safe. If you were going to go, you should have gone in the late summer or early fall. But since that horse is out of the barn… I think it’s safer than your first plan. Assuming the weather cooperates, you should be alright. It will get you where you’re going faster, and that should be your priority right now.”

“Great,” Roy muttered.

But Felicity had just processed something that Rocky had said. “Wait, you said Baron got a message to you. How?”

“Oh, smoke signals,” said Rocky. 

“Really?” Roy looked impressed. Rocky threw his head back and laughed.

“Naw, man. I’m just messing with you. Long wave radio.” He looked back to Felicity and grew serious. “When you’re done up there, you really won’t be able to cross the inlet. You’ll have to get to Baron, and they’ll radio for me. I’ll come back for you, no matter what.” His eyes were full of concern, and as the silence lengthened, he didn’t break her gaze. Felicity knew that he was truly worried for them.

Roy cleared his throat, pointedly. “Will you come back for me, too?”

Rocky grinned at him. “Yeah, I guess I could make a little room for you.”

For a few minutes, they watched the flames in silence. Then Roy spoke up again. “So you got a call on the radio before we left telling you that they’re short on whiskey, and you decided to hike 75 miles each way to deliver some to them personally?” His voice was skeptical. “In what you’re saying is the worst season for travel?”

Rocky busied himself about the fire, avoiding their faces. “Well, it’s not so dangerous for me. I know what I’m doing. And whiskey is pretty important to people around here.”

Roy nodded. “ _And_ it will put you back here on the beach in less than two weeks.”

Rocky shrugged, uncomfortably. “And that, yeah. Look - this might be harder than you think. I don’t know what you’re really here for -” he held up a hand to interrupt Felicity’s protest - “and I don’t care. Whatever it is, it’s important enough to you that you’re risking your lives to go after it. Fine. That’s your choice. Just like it’s my choice to be on this beach again in a couple of weeks.” He glanced at Roy, and then looked away quickly. “Maybe I’ll even hang out here for a while. If it gets too hard - too dangerous - turn around. Come back. If I’m not back yet, use the boat for shelter.” He took Felicity’s hand and, holding it in one of his, again sought her gaze. His voice was low and serious. “Whatever else you do -  survive. OK? Survive and come back.”

 

********************

 

They were navigating by dead reckoning, and Oliver knew that the stakes were high. Baron was a small town, almost precisely 200 miles southeast of the plateau, and if they bore a few degrees too far in either direction, they could easily miss it and find themselves lost in the wilderness. They had a few landmarks to go by, and every couple of days they would find themselves at “the old fire tower” or “the slow river.” This last one was especially important because it was the last landmark before the town itself. It was the broadest point of a river that, 50 miles west, emptied into a massive inlet that split the coastline and, from there, into the ocean. Kaya had told them to cross at this point because the slower current meant that it would stay frozen longer, but by the time they arrived, there had been no sign of a thaw, and they crossed easily.

On the other side of the river, a massive wall of pines signaled the end of the tundra and the beginning, however sparse, of civilization. Next to him on the ice, Oliver felt Tommy slow and then stop as he contemplated the forest. Oliver realized that this would be the first time Tommy had seen anyone other than the League or the Kawani in over two years. Even Oliver felt his heartbeat pick up at the thought of human contact - radios and telephones and mail delivery. They would be in touch again. The patience that had never failed him from the moment they decided to make the journey began to strain, and he fought the impulse to break into a run.

At the same time, a part of him wanted to turn and head back into the wilderness. When he had come this way before - by biplane, flown by an earnest young man who had seemed reluctant to drop him in such a forlorn spot - everything had been so clear. Kill Ra’s or be killed. Win everything or lose everything. Now he was returning to a world of doubt and uncertainty, and a part of him missed the clarity that he had brought with him. If he felt ambivalent after two months, he could only imagine how Tommy felt after two years. He didn’t need to imagine, though - the look of naked fear on his friend’s face was clear enough. 

Oliver began to speak, as if to himself. “When I was on the island, I used to think that, if I could just get home again, everything would be OK. Then I did get home.” He took a cautious step forward on the ice. “Everyone expected me to be so relieved. So happy. And I was - don’t get me wrong. Seeing my family, seeing you and Laurel again - it was all I had wished for for so long.” He didn’t glance back, but he could feel the movement of the air as Tommy shifted position. “The problem was, it seemed like everyone expected me to be the person I used to be, before the island. The person they had lost. And… I wasn’t. I wasn’t the same Oliver Queen who’d gotten on that yacht, and after a while, I couldn’t pretend to be anymore.” Oliver paused. “Pretending to be the kid who had left five years ago meant that I was leaving a part of myself stranded on that island forever. If I wanted to come home, I had to _come home_ \- all the way. Including the parts of me that I wished I could leave behind.” He reached the shore and climbed the bank in two long strides. “So let me give you some advice from someone who knows what it’s like to come back from the dead: don’t _try_ to come back from the dead. Let the part of you that’s dead stay dead, and let the parts of you that survived come home.”

When Oliver turned back, Tommy had reached the edge of the ice, and was just stepping onto solid ground. He grasped the hand that Oliver offered and climbed the steep embankment to the forest’s edge.

 

********************

 

Early the next morning, they all departed - Roy and Felicity up the beach and Rocky, with one last wave and soulful look, disappearing into the thick pines. As they had inventoried their supplies, Rocky had raised an eyebrow at their bows and arrows and vicious looking knives, but didn’t say anything. Instead, he added a flare gun to the pile. It was a long shot, he said, but if they fired from the top of the plateau it was just possible that it would be visible from the fire tower in Baron.

As they started off up the beach, Roy was smiling to himself. “Poor guy,” he said. “Did you see that look he gave you last night? I was afraid he was about to drop to one knee.”

“I think we were safe from any marriage proposals.”

“Or is it poor Ray? Maybe you’re into the Paul Bunyan type.”

“Seriously, Roy… I don’t think I’m _his_ type _._ ”

“You sure? He couldn’t get through a sentence without turning beet red.”

Felicity looked at him pointedly. “He could when _you_ weren’t around.”

“What? Why would it matter if I was…” Understanding dawned, and to Felicity’s surprised, Roy’s own cheeks flushed a faint pink.

“Oh-ho!” She crowed. “Looks like Rocky isn’t the only one with the blushing problem!”

“Shut up,” said Roy, through gritted teeth. After a moment, though, and to her further surprise, he grinned. “Good guy. I always did like him.”

“ _Not_ as much as he liked you.”

“Well, he clearly has excellent taste.”

“Oh, God.” She rolled her eyes. “I _knew_ I shouldn’t tell you.”

“It’s my charisma,” said Roy, seriously. He thought for a moment. “And my cheekbones.”

“What about _his_ cheekbones?!” Felicity cried, glad to have something to distract them from the daunting journey ahead. “Not to mention that dimple… Roy Parker, you would be _lucky_ to land a man like Rocky. I think you should give him a chance.”

They bickered on, picking up their pace to keep warm, occasionally reaching out a hand to steady or assist one another over an obstacle. Felicity thought, briefly, about what it would be like to be alone on this beach, the miles stretching forlornly ahead of her. She wanted to tell Roy exactly how grateful she was that he was here, but she wasn’t sure how. Instead, she contented herself with countering, point by point, his list of irresistible qualities, until his indignant voice rose above the sound of the crashing waves and echoed up the beach, beating an uncertain but steady path between the impenetrable wall of pines and the wild infinity of the sea.

 

********************

 

It was two more days before they reached the town, with Tommy obsessively checking the bearing on his compass now that Oliver couldn’t see the stars through the thick foliage.

They moved quickly now that the ground was firm and dry; the trees were so thick that very little snowfall had penetrated them. When he first smelled woodsmoke, Oliver was certain that it had to be his imagination - but then Tommy smelled it, too. Without speaking, they both began to pick up their pace until they were almost running.

They reached the clearing just after nightfall. A couple of pre-fab houses and trailers clustered around one wood-frame structure with warm light glowing from its windows and smoke drifting from its chimney.

Their knock was answered quickly, by a tall, heavy-set man wearing overalls and a massive, tangled, chestnut brown beard. Rosy cheeks and deep brown eyes claimed the small real estate left by the beard, which was streaked with gray and clearly hadn’t been groomed since fall. The man was grinning as though he was expecting them, but his face fell and words of welcome faded when he saw the two bedraggled strangers on his doorstep. 

“Rocky! It’s about time, you lazy sonofa... what the _hell_? Who in the name of my frosty ballsack are you boys?” 


	5. Chapter 5

The plan was to follow the coast north until they crossed the inlet; about 70 miles. From there it would be 175 more headed northeast across the tundra to reach the plateau. They were sketching an angle, rather than a straight line - but Felicity wanted to navigate by the coast for as long as possible. With no landmarks and no towns between them, it would be too easy in the dense forest to go off track. Once they were in the open on the flat tundra, Rocky had assured them that on a clear day they would be able to see the plateau from almost a hundred miles in any direction.

For days, the landscape didn’t change. The ocean and sky were so gray that it was impossible to tell where one started and the other began. Felicity kept her eyes on the deep, cool green of the forest to her right, but Roy rarely took his eyes off the sea. One morning, a pod of seals kept pace with them just offshore in the breakers, so close that Roy wondered out loud if he would be able to wade in and touch one. The seals seemed curious about them, and Felicity understood the impulse to make contact.

“Don’t,” she said, as Roy impulsively took a step towards the water.

“I know,” he said. “It’s too cold.” He looked sad at the unbreachable distance between them and the other species. “They just look so… intelligent. Like if we got close enough, we could have a conversation.”

“We’d better hope they’re not that smart. They might figure out that we’re wearing their grandparents.” When Roy didn’t make a move to walk on, she suggested, “Let’s sit and watch them for a little while.” In this new world, Roy seemed to be shedding his cynical city-boy exterior. She felt an odd impulse to protect this new, vulnerable side of him - to give it space and room to grow, and time to see what it might become.

As they watched the seals, Felicity wondered if this was how he had always been, if she had just missed it because she hadn’t been looking. He was so ready to put his whole heart in - to saving the Glades, loving Thea, following Oliver - no matter how many times it got broken. Like Sin, he had been burned by a life on the street and, somehow, come through the fire pure and whole.

“What?” He asked, not looking at her.

“What, what?”

“You’re staring at me. What?”

Felicity wondered what she could say without embarrassing him. “Nothing. I was just… What did you write in your letter to Thea?”

He looked at her, startled. “How did you know I wrote a letter to Thea?”

She turned back to the seals, giving him space. “I figured that if it was a letter to Ray or Digg, you wouldn’t have gone through so many drafts.”

Roy was quiet for a long time. “What would you have said to Oliver, if you’d known it was the last time?”

Felicity tilted her head thoughtfully and squinted. The spray was making her glasses fog, so that the seals and the sea were beginning to blend together. “I guess… that I wasn’t sorry for anything. That it was worth it.” Out here, she could talk about it without choking up. Somehow, between the sky and the ocean, there was space for her grief.

“Yeah.” Roy’s hand drifted over the rocky surface of the beach until he found a patch of sand. He trailed his fingers through it, making patterns that were gone, demolished by the spray and the wind, almost as soon as they had formed. “That’s pretty much what I said.”

********************

The man hadn’t waited for their response before ushering them into the house. It was warmed only by the fire, but it was the only warmth that Tommy and Oliver had felt in almost two weeks.

“Oh, for the love of… would you get those damn coats off before you flood my living room?”

“Sorry, sorry.” Tommy rushed to comply, his cold fingers fumbling with the clasps of the overcoat. Oliver was slower to obey, using the time to scan the house. They were standing in what seemed to be the only room on the ground floor. Straight ahead, there was another door that led out the back; to their right was a huge fireplace with a roaring fire and a small kitchenette with a stove and a sink. To the left were rows and rows of shelves, cluttered with bits of pieces of machinery shoulder-by-shoulder with the kind of convenience store food- mac and cheese, canned peaches, instant coffee. Many of the shelves were bare. All were dusty.

“Satisfied that I’m not hiding any siege weapons in here? Willing to take off your coat?” The man was watching Oliver, and the movement of his beard indicated that he was smiling. “I’m Harvey. This is my store. You’re welcome to come on in, warm up, spend the night, but I swear to God if you don’t stop dripping on my floor I’m gonna put my boot in your ass.”

“You’re not wearing boots.” Oliver looked down at the man’s gigantic feet, covered in thick gray socks that had been darned so often they looked like they were growing tumors.

“I will put some on. Then I will put one in your ass. Thank you.” Harvey took the coat that Oliver offered him and hung both his and Tommy’s up, carefully adjusting them on the hanger as though anxious to avoid wrinkles.

Harvey settled them in chairs by the fire, fussing like a mother hen and cursing like a sailor. “Are you warm enough? It’s cold as tits in here, but I ran out of fuel two weeks ago, and that goddamned kid won’t get off his ass before the end of the month. You hungry? I’ve got some canned stew that I’ve been eating cold. Tastes like ass but I’d be happy to warm some up for you.”

Oliver and Tommy turned down the stew but accept two small glasses of “the last of my mother-loving whiskey, I swear to Christ, that goddamned kid…” and waited for Harvey to settle in across from them with his own glass.

“So. Who the hell are you boys, and what are you doing in the frozen asshole of the world on a night like this?”

Oliver opened his mouth to respond and froze. He couldn’t believe that he hadn’t prepared a cover story. He had been so focused on getting there that it hadn’t occurred to him that, once he got there, someone might ask where he had come from.

Tommy spoke up. “We were up here hunting last fall and we missed our ride out. Had to winter over. We took shelter in the old Kawani village north of here, made our rations stretch, ate what we killed. As soon as it was warm enough to move, we made a break for it.”

Harvey didn’t respond for a long while. He poked at the fire and added a log, then he sat back and took a long drink of whiskey, tipping his head back to get the last drops. Finally, he sighed.

“That’s a helluva story. _Hell_ of a story. You sure are lucky to be alive.” Tommy nodded, earnestly. Harvey met his gaze squarely. “I supposed mostly I’m just surprised that the League of Assassins didn’t mind you bunking with them. They’re not usually known for being real hospitable.”

Oliver and Tommy looked at each other, and then back at Harvey, in silence. Oliver’s hand went to his waist, where he had a knife strapped. He had left his bow with his pack at the front door, but he could do plenty of damage with the knife. He saw Tommy’s hand stray to his own chest.

Harvey busted out laughing, and the sound seemed to rattle the cluttered little house. “Shit, boys. You think I’m stupid? Those buildings up there haven’t been abandoned since the Kawani split. Maybe Rocky and his folks down in town are too far away to know what’s going on, but you can’t live all the way out here and not see a thing or two. Then you two come wandering down here during the ugliest season of the year, looking like you dropped straight out of some goddamned martial arts movie, and I’m supposed to think you’re just a couple of dumbass rich big game hunters who somehow survived a winter that could kill a Yeti?” He shook his head. “Don’t screw with me, boys. Tell me or don’t, but know one thing - I don’t help the League and I don’t go to war with the League. I don’t give a shit about the League, actually. I give a shit about keeping an eye on the shitheel poachers that come out of the woodwork around here come autumn. That’s it. I stay out of the League’s way. You gonna have a problem with that?” As he spoke, he leaned forward and again threw another on the fire, then he tossed an extra blanket at Tommy. “Wrap up. You don’t want to lose the other arm to frostbite.”

Oliver cleared his throat. “We… just want to keep out of the League’s way, too. That’s why we’re here. We need to get a message out.”

“You need to get your _selves_ out, you mean.

“No. We’re going back - there’s something we still have to do.” Oliver held up his hands to stop Harvey from asking another question. “Staying out of the League’s way is a good rule. Don’t ask us any more, and we won’t have to lie to you.”

Harvey tilted his head and considered them thoughtfully. “I guess that’s fair enough. If you change your mind, I can point you in the direction to get out of here. Or you’re welcome to stay on until Rocky comes, and you can leave with him.”

“That’s very kind of you,” said Tommy. “But all we need is to leave some mail with you. Or maybe make a phone call. Is that possible?”

But Harvey was shaking his head. “Mail, no problem. Might take a while, but it’ll get where it’s going. But the phone’s been down all winter. Sorry about that - the line runs underground and I won’t be able to dig down to fix it until after the thaw. You’re welcome to use the long wave radio, but that’s about all I can offer you.”

Tommy looked frustrated, but Oliver said, “No problem. Mail it is. Harvey, do you hunt?”

“Sure. Legal game. Hard to survive out here without it. Deer, muskrat. Groundhog. Any little sonofabitch that goes after my garden.”

“You have any bones? Skulls?”

Tommy looked at Oliver in disgust but Harvey’s face brightened. “Hell yeah! You a student of anatomy? I’ve got a hell of a collection, just added a fox that I found out back…”

He wandered off down the stairs, calling up every few minutes about the specimens he uncovered in the spring when the snow melted. Tommy wrinkled his nose at Oliver.

“Really? You’ve developed a sudden interest in taxidermy?”

“Don’t worry about it.” Oliver stood up. “You just worry about how you’re going to get a message to Laurel.”

Tommy shrugged. “I’ll send a letter to her dad. The League is less likely to be watching him. I’ll be brief - you know, ‘sorry I’m alive, I know you always hated me, I still love your daughter and because of that she’s in terrible danger.’ I figure it should go over well.”

Oliver frowned. “That’s risky, Tommy. If the League intercepts it, they’ll know exactly who to go after to hurt you the most.”

“Yeah, except if they know to intercept it, it means that they already know who to go after. I’m taking the risk, Oliver. What’s your great idea?”

“I know who the League will be watching, so the message itself will have to be coded somehow - just something so they know that I’m alive. Digg will draw the right conclusions. If the League intercepts it, they won’t recognize it as a warning.”

Tommy sighed. “OK, I give up. What is ‘it’? A note written in invisible ink? Something in a secret language that you guys invented for just this eventuality?”

“In a way.” Oliver smiled enigmatically and followed Harvey down the stairs. “Hey, Harvey? Do you think I could borrow one of your bones?”

********************

By the time they reached the inlet, they had settled into a routine. They weren’t moving as quickly as Felicity had hoped - the footing on the rocky beaches was often bad and they had to move cautiously, sometimes even leaping from rock to rock between freezing tidal pools -- but they were moving, covering what she estimated to be about 10 miles a day. At night they took shelter from the wind in the trees, pitching Felicity’s tent and then draping it with sealskin and fur for extra insulation. They slept curled up close together and, based on the blushing advice of Rocky, zipped their sleeping bags together to maximize body heat.

In the morning, they ate quickly, usually one of the energy bars that Felicity had stowed in her pack. Then, they walked. And walked. In the first few days, Felicity desperately shifted the weight of her pack from one shoulder to the other, higher up and farther down her back, thinking that if she could just find the right way to balance it her muscles might stop screaming in agony. Finally, she gave up, and just tried to ignore the pain until, by the third or fourth day, it had died down to a dull ache.

When the sun started to drop, they would make camp, build a fire, and eat again - this time usually a bird or small animal that one of them had shot over the course of the day. The first time she had tracked a small rabbit, its nose twitching as it explored the morning air and warily made its way out from the safety of its lair, and then loosed an arrow into its small breast, her stomach lurched and she had been uncertain if she would be able to eat it. But that night, after Roy had skinned and cooked it, when the option was the fresh, sizzling meat or another granola bar, it had been an easy choice. After that, the killing was easier, though Felicity still hated the moment when the heavy impact of an arrow stopped a bird in flight and sent it plummeting towards earth.

On the day they reached the inlet, the sky dawned clear blue and, for the first time since leaving Starling City, Felicity could believe that it was spring. As she surveyed the vast expanse of ice before them, the thought was troubling. It was at least a mile across at this point, and if the temperature rose into the high 20s, the combination of the increased temperature and the flow of the melt-water from inland could make the crossing dangerous.

The climb down to the ice was relatively easy. One of Felicity’s purchases that _had_ been worth the money was several lengths of high quality, lightweight climbing rope. Tying off the rope to a tree at the top of the cliff - there was still thick forest on this side of the chasm, though the other side was flat tundra - they each rappelled down. Then Roy severed the top of the rope with a well-aimed arrow, so that the rest of it came spiraling down to join them on the ice, where Felicity coiled and packed it.

By this time the morning was growing late, and as cold as it was, Felicity was aware of the sun beating down on them. She was also becoming increasingly aware of an odd noise - a creaky wailing, like deep-pitched whale song. It was the sound of the ice, moaning under pressure as it shifted and buckled.

“That… can’t be good,” said Roy, uneasily.

“It’s starting to break up, but it won’t happen all at once,” said Felicity, but her voice was uncertain. “This is the first warm day we’ve had. It can’t have thawed yet.”

Silently, they contemplated the distance to the other side. From here it looked as though they could almost reach out and touch it. “Well,” said Roy, “here goes nothing.” With Felicity close behind and the angry howl of the ice rising around them, they began the crossing.  

********************

The day dawned clear and blue. Tommy and Oliver had slept on mats by the hearth, though Harvey had offered either or both of them his own cot by the fire.

Oliver woke up first and shook Tommy awake. In silence, they got up and packed their gear while Harvey was still snoring gently. They had prepared their messages the night before, Oliver working late into the night and Tommy, for all his nonchalance, tossing draft after draft of his letter into the fire, and now they addressed them carefully and left them on the beat-up aluminum table that stood in for a dining room.

Behind them, Harvey snorted and sat up. “Sweet _Christ_ , what the hell time is this? You ladies are sure in an all-fired rush to get out of here - I’ll try not to take it personally.” He groaned as he heaved himself up and his feet touched the cold floor. “Can’t even wait for the sun to get all the way up. Alright, alright, hold onto your titties, I’ll make you some shit-tasting eggs.”

As he pulled on the monstrous socks and went in search of the powdered eggs -- despite Oliver and Tommy’s assurances that it definitely wasn’t necessary -- there was a knock on the door. Harvey’s face lit up.

“It’s like goddamned mardi gras around here! Man moves to the middle of cock-freeze nowhere and still can’t get any peace and quiet.” He made it to the door before the newcomer had a chance to knock twice, and opened it on a beaming young man who looked as though he’d stepped out of a sporting goods catalog. He had a dimple in one cheek.

“Jesus,” muttered Tommy. “It’s Arctic Circle Ken.”

“Rocky!” Harvey bellowed as if he had found his long-lost son, drawing the younger man in for a bear hug. “You son of a bitch! Took your time, didn’t you? I could’ve starved to death out here! Get the hell inside before you freeze, you little bastard!”

“It’s actually not bad out…” Rocky trailed off as, waiting for the hug to end, he spotted Tommy and Oliver over Harvey’s shoulder. “Oh. Hi.”

Harvey closed the door behind Rocky. “Tommy and Oliver. They’re on their way out, poor chumps. Don’t let the door hit you, fellas. Rocky, did you bring the whiskey?”

Rocky ignored the question and nodded at Oliver. “I was wondering what happened to you.”

Harvey raised his eyebrows, looking back and forth between Oliver and Rocky. “You fellows… know each other?”

For no reason that Oliver could determine, Rocky blushed. “I flew Oliver out to the old Kawani territory. When I asked him when I should come back for him, he kinda… shook his head and muttered something. Ran off before I could get a straight answer. Been wondering ever since what happened to him.” He clapped Oliver on the back. “Glad you’re not dead, man.” He frowned at Tommy, puzzled. “And you… I don’t know. Don’t get many visitors to this area who don’t go through me.”

Harvey snorted. “Ain’t it the truth.”

Rocky, ignoring the comment, continued to watch Oliver and Tommy curiously, but when they didn’t volunteer any additional information, he let the subject drop.

Despite his earlier words, Harvey showed no signs of releasing Tommy and Oliver until he had fed them - powdered eggs and the instant coffee that Rocky had brought. As they sat around the table, Harvey kept up the conversation as though they were all old friends.

“So you decided to hike in this time instead of just getting in the goddamned plane and flying here? What, you’re not getting enough fresh air down there in town?”

Rocky shrugged. “We had a couple come in last week, wanted to charter a boat. I figured as long as I was headed north, I’d stop in. Not much else going on, thought you could use the company.” Oliver thought the words were innocuous enough, but the tips of Rocky’s ears turned pink. Harvey grinned.

“Oh yeah? How’s the talent?”

Rocky sighed, wistfully. “Gorgeous. Unavailable. The usual.” He seemed to remember that Oliver and Tommy were there, and the pink color spread to his cheeks. “I mean, they seemed nice.”

Harvey whooped. “God _damn_ , boy, we have _got_ to get you laid! When are they coming back through? Why are they here at all during this armpit of a season?”

Rocky shrugged uncomfortably. “I hope they make it back at all, to be honest. They were heading north to old Kawani territory, and it’s a bad time of year to…”

Oliver, who had been letting his attention drift, snapped his head up. Across the table he saw Tommy’s eyes widen. “What?”

“They said they’re graduate students and that their thesis is on the Kawani. Why?”

Shit. The last thing they needed was a couple of random kids wandering around, getting into trouble, trespassing on the League or, worse, finding real traces of the Kawani.

“That’s where these boys are headed, too.” Harvey’s voice was still jovial, but there was an edge beneath it. “I’m surprised you dropped them at all, Rocky. Sounds like a couple of tourists who are gonna get themselves killed.”

Rocky looked defensive. “I warned them about how dangerous it is this time of year. They were going to come here first, but I told them to head straight north, try to cross the inlet before the thaw. To be honest, I’m a little worried. I hope they already made it across, or decided to turn back. It’s getting pretty warm out there.”

Oliver was worried too, but for a different reason. He stood up. “We’d better get going, then. Sounds like the thaw might make our river crossing tricky, too.” He held out a hand to Harvey. “Harvey, thanks for the hospitality. Maybe we’ll see you again when… when we’re done. Rocky, nice to meet you. We’d appreciate you taking that,” nodding at the small package and the letter, still sitting in the middle of the table beneath a coffee cup, “when you go back out. The sooner the better.”

“I’ll head back out today or tomorrow. I might hang out on the beach a while before starting back, though, just in case that couple gets smart and turns back. But I should be able to get these headed for…” He looked at the addresses. “Starling City by the end of the month.” He frowned, thoughtfully. “Huh.”

If Oliver had asked, Rocky might have commented on how odd it was to get three pieces of mail addressed to Starling City from two different groups within two weeks. But Oliver was thinking about the river and the thaw, and about all of the ways the students Rocky had mentioned might cause trouble for them. He and Tommy barely took the time to finish their coffee and thank Rocky and Harvey again before heading out the door into the bright, ever-warming morning.

 


	6. Chapter 6

They were more than halfway across when Felicity noticed the trickling. Compared to the creaking ice, it made almost no sound. If it hadn’t been for her wet boots, she might not have noticed at all.

“Um, Roy?” She called. She had to raise her voice to be heard above the moan, and then she heard it - beneath the sound of the ice breaking up. A rushing, burbling noise, like a stream through a forest. 

“I know,” he said grimly. The water was rising and was clearly running out to sea. “Is it the ice? Is it melting?”

If it hadn’t been for the fur-lined sealskin boots, Felicity knew that her feet would be numb. On the other hand, she might have noticed the problem sooner. The flow had reached ankle height before the well-insulated boots had begun to leak. 

“If the ice were melting, it would be breaking up.” Felicity stomped her foot to illustrate her point. “It’s still solid.” An idea occurring to her, she bent over and touched a finger to the water and then to her mouth. It was slightly salty, but nowhere near the brine of ocean water that should have made up the ice this close to the sea. “Roy, I don’t think it’s from _this_ ice. This is the mouth of a river, right? I think that the fresh water ice upstream is melting and running downstream. It’s hitting this ice and running on top of it to the ocean.”

“So… we’re OK?” Roy asked doubtfully. He lifted his foot out of the stream. It made a loud squelch.

“ _No_. Look at how fast the water level is climbing. And it’s running with nothing to slow its current - just a clear channel to the ocean. Roy, if it climbs over our knees… how long do you think we can hold out against it? The ice isn’t the problem anymore. Getting swept out to sea _is_.”

Roy squinted upstream, as if seeking the source of the danger. “What do we do?”

Felicity looked behind her. There was no way they could make it back the way they had come. “ _We run_.”

Without wasting time or breath, she took off, with Roy right behind her. In their heavy boots and waders, carrying their packs,she  knew that they couldn’t be making great time. She dug in and pushed, remembering her runs in the Glades with Thea. Roy overtook her and, grabbing her hand, pulled her on. The water was midway up her calves now, finding the few small tears in her waders and numbing her skin. She and Roy stumbled on, using each other for support, moving more and more slowly as the water rose, numbing their legs and fighting their movement.

They were a quarter mile away… now two tenths, and the water was above their knees.

_We’re not going to make it._

Roy went down first, ripping his hand away from hers so that he wouldn’t bring her down too. “Keep going,” he yelled, battling the rushing water to get back to his feet. “I’ll see you over there!” But Felicity had fallen too. Each time either of them tried to raise a foot to make progress, the current sucked it out from under them and pushed them a little bit closer to the open ocean.

Their backpacks were sopping and were dragging them down, but Felicity knew that if they let them go, surviving the crossing would just mean a slower death from exposure. She clutched her pack in one hand and pulled out the coiled rope, her bow, and an arrow with the other. Roy saw what she was doing and grabbed the pack to give her use of both her hands so that she could tie the rope to the arrow. Desperately, Felicity scanned the cliff that was less than a tenth of a mile away now, but might as well have been on the moon.

There. A tree growing outward from the cliff, about five feet above the water, that looked like it might take their weight. She aimed and fired, going down again as she did so, but the arrow flew true and, splitting two branches, wedged itself firmly between them when Felicity yanked the rope back towards her.

Ray grabbed her around the waist and she pulled them both, hand over hand, towards the other bank. With the rope to anchor them, they covered the distance quickly. Roy boosted Felicity until she could reach the tree and wind the rope around the thickest branch, and then they both used it to climb up until they were braced, several feet above the rushing water, in the branches of the tree.

Only then did Roy let out a long, shaking breath. “Nice shortcut,” he said. “If I ever get my hands on Rocky…”

“He’s probably never seen it do this. I’d imagine it only happens one or two days each year, when the temperature rises enough to melt the fresh water but not the salt water.”

Roy leaned his head back and closed his eyes. “Good thing you’re smart.”

“Well, it didn’t really matter that we knew why it was happening...”

Roy opened his eyes. “What? Oh. Well, it kind of did, because you figured out that it was going to get worse. But I actually meant with the arrow. I would be in the ocean by now if you hadn’t had that idea.” He grinned at her, still breathing heavily. “Pretty bad-ass, Felicity.” He sat up and contemplated the 50 foot climb above them. “Any more great ideas? Like about how to get up this thing?”

“Yeah.” Felicity, flushed from his praise, hauled her weight from the tree to a crevice in the rock, and leaned back to look for hand holds. The water was only a couple of feet below them now. “Start climbing.”

 

********************

 

The two days that it took them to get back to the river were sunny and above freezing. By the time they made it to the place where they had crossed before, Oliver already knew what they would see. There were too many chunks of ice careening with the current for a raft to make it safely across, but not nearly enough ice remained to make walking possible.

The sun was going down, so they made camp. At least this way, they could have a fire while they were still under cover of the trees. Still, Oliver felt disheartened and knew that Tommy felt the same. Here they were, about to cross back into the barren tundra, leaving behind the only contact with the wider world that they had known in the last two months. For Tommy, in the last two years. The knowledge that they were walking away from everything that they wanted - connection with home - made the setback of the thaw feel almost unbearable.

“Look, tomorrow, we’ll walk west to the bridge that Harvey told us about.”

“It’s more than 20 miles out of our way.” Tommy took a swig from the flask that Harvey had insisted on sending with them, and passed it to Oliver. 

“So we’ll lose a couple of days. We made really good time on the way down here. It would be stupid to take risks now that we don’t have to.”

Tommy groaned. “I know, I know you’re right. I just….”

“I know,” said Oliver, softly. “It feels like we’re walking the wrong way.”

Oliver tilted his head back to see the night sky, but the moon was too bright to make out many stars. The whiskey burned in his throat, and suddenly, he felt like talking.

“You know what Felicity told me once? The constellation that we know as Orion makes an appearance in cultures on almost every continent. Everyone looked at this cluster of stars and saw the same thing. A hunter or a warrior - either way, he’s always fighting.”

“You mean the guy with the belt and the sword and the bow? That’s probably why everyone sees him that way… you go waving a bow and arrow around, people are going to make assumptions.” Tommy craned his neck to see where Oliver was looking, but all he saw was moonlight and branches.

“But it’s not a bow- people always get that wrong. I thought it was a bow, too. Every winter night on the island, I thought, ‘there’s the guy with the bow.’ I thought he was like my totem, or something. Or a good luck charm. There’s an archer up there in summer too - I think it’s Sagittarius - but I always liked Orion better. Because he was out in winter. It seemed like he was a survivor.” Tommy drew his blanket more closely around him and closed his eyes. Oliver wondered if he was dozing off. “But Felicity says that it’s not a bow. It’s a shield. She says that he had to be killed because he vowed to destroy the world, and he was resurrected in the stars, but he can never rest. Every night, all winter long, he holds his shield against the onslaught of the scorpion who put him up there in the first place, for the good of the world.”

“So… a guy with an inflated sense of self-importance who can’t put down his shield. I wonder why Felicity picked _that_ story to tell you,” Tommy said, wryly.

Oliver let his own eyes close.  He wondered about Harvey’s whiskey. He hadn’t had that much, but he was feeling a little drunk. “Actually, I don’t know if the shield is to protect him from the scorpion or to protect the world from him. The story isn’t very clear.”

Tommy propped himself up on one elbow. “OK, so you’re the big sexy tortured hero. So what does that make me? The bug?”

Oliver clapped him on the shoulder. “Sorry, man. I didn’t write the story.”

“So who’s Felicity? The one who sent the scorpion after you?”

“Nope. Felicity doesn’t fit.” Oliver smiled at the thought. “If Felicity’s in the story, who’s around to tell it to me?”

“No, no, I’ve got it! Felicity has to be the shield. You know, keeps you safe, keeps the world safe from you. It’s very romantic.”

Oliver made a face. “That’s not romantic. I’m not turning the woman I love into a shield. That’s a terrible thing to do to a person.”

Tommy let the subject drop. For a while, Oliver thought he had gone to sleep. Then his eyes popped open as though he’d thought of something important.

“But we only see him for half the year.”

“Yeah? So?”

“So, who knows what he does with the rest of his time?” Tommy mumbled sleepily, letting his eyes close again. “Boozing in Cabo, probably. Shield in one hand, stack of singles in the other.”

_Maybe he does put it down._ The thought was muddled and vague from whiskey, but he wished he could explain it Tommy. It felt important. _When he drops below the horizon - when his journey is over - maybe, for a little while, he can lay down his shield._


	7. Chapter 7

The night after they crossed the inlet, Felicity was worried that they might freeze to death. If it hadn’t been for Rocky’s suggestion that they line their packs with trash bags to keep what was in them dry, they probably would have. Felicity pointed out that they probably owed Rocky their lives; Roy pointed out that they wouldn’t need saving if it hadn’t been for Rocky’s suggestion that they cross the inlet in the first place, and they finally agreed to disagree. 

After that first, long night, shivering in silence, each separately counting the minutes until the sun rose at last, the harsh conditions of the tundra - alternating between mud and snow, with no trees to break the wind and no fires for fear of alerting the League to their presence - didn’t seem as bad as Felicity had feared they would be, and they made better time than they had on the beach. Once more they fell into their routine, but the flat, frozen marshland allowed them to cover more than 15 miles a day.

They had been traveling for 10 days, and the plateau had been in view for almost a week. It was massive. Felicity was beginning to worry about how they were going to summit it when, one morning, the sky - which had been clear and sunny since they had crossed the inlet - clouded over in a matter of moments.

Roy examined the towering clouds. “Is it warm enough for rain?” he asked, but the hopelessness in his voice indicated that he already knew the answer.

“No. It’ll be snow.” Felicity drew her collar tight against the raw wind. “Roy, if it’s bad - we have to keep moving, no matter what. We don’t know how cold it will get, or how deep. If we stop, we could freeze, or be buried. We’ll try to stay pointed north, but the important thing is just that we keep walking as long as we can, OK?”

The snow started around noon, and within a few hours, visibility was so bad that they needed to tie themselves together to keep from losing each other. The howling of the wind meant that speech was impossible, so they communicated by pulling on the rope and gesturing.

They kept going for as long as the snow did, walking blind, struggling through knee high drifts and dragging one another forward when one of them felt like they were going to drop. Finally, after midnight, the snow began to lighten, and the clouds to break up. Felicity caught a glimpse of the moon, her muscles burning, her fingers numb, pulled on the rope and gave Roy the signal that they could finally stop walking.

For the rest of the night they took turns sleeping and keeping an eye on the weather, in case the snow started up again, but the storm was over. In the morning, Felicity shook Roy awake when the sun came up.

“What do you notice?”

He rubbed his eyes and glared.  “That it’s really, _really_ early?”

“Roy, look at the sun. It’s rising over there - in the direction that we’ve been walking. We veered off course. Way, way off course. I figure we were walking due east for most of yesterday.”

Roy shrugged. “So we redirect, right?”

Felicity sighed. “Yeah. It’s just frustrating - with the snow so deep, there’s no way we’ll be able to make good time. We were doing so well.”

Roy clapped her on the back, his ill humor fading, as it did every morning. “Hey, we survived, didn’t we? I say we’re still doing well.” He eyed the plateau where it loomed in the distance, then froze and grabbed her arm. “Felicity -"

“ _Shh.”_ She had seen them at the same moment he did - two figures, silhouetted by the rising sun. They were too far to make out details, but they were clearly on the move.

Shit. The League? Poachers? Felicity couldn’t think of a possibility that didn’t mean trouble. Her hand went to her bow, and she dropped her backpack.

 

********************

 

When the blizzard hit, Oliver figured that he and Tommy were less than two days from the plateau. They were approaching from due south, thanks to the detour they had taken to cross the river. When the sky darkened and the snow started, they briefly talked about the possibility of digging in and waiting it out, but decided that the risk of suffocation was too high. Instead, they did their best to keep moving through landscape that, unfamiliar to begin with, was now transformed by a thick blanket of snow.

Tommy and Oliver stayed close and kept moving, not trying to speak, each of them lost in thought. Oliver was watching in vain for glimpses of the sun and, after darkness fell, of the stars, trying to orient himself. He couldn’t shake the feeling that they were drifting west, but he kept it to himself. If they did skew west, it might cost them a couple of days, but at this distance from the plateau there was no risk of getting lost. It was the only geological feature for hundreds of miles, and it towered above the rest of the landscape.

Battling through the deepening drifts, Oliver could guess what was behind Tommy’s silence. As they drew closer to the mine, Tommy had grown quiet and more thoughtful. Oliver knew that the time was coming when his friend was going to have to make a decision between the hope of Laurel’s love, and a life fighting at N’sal’s side. He also knew that there was nothing he could say to make that choice any easier, so when Tommy lost himself in thought, Oliver let him go.

Darkness had long fallen, and the snow was beginning to lighten, when Oliver thought he saw a flash of deep pink off to their left. Instinctively, he veered for it, ignoring Tommy’s questioning look. He remembered the bird that, in his escape from the League, had been the only flash of color in a black and white world. He had described it to Kaya one evening at dinner, and she had said that it sounded like a purple finch, but they weren’t common this early in the year. Maybe it had migrated too early, she said, or maybe it had never left for the winter. Since then, Oliver had felt oddly worried about the little bird, alone and out of its element. He picked up his pace as they approached the spot of color, hoping that it wasn’t a finch that had frozen in the blizzard. 

It wasn’t. Slowly, Oliver leaned down and picked up the bright pink bandana. He showed it to Tommy.

“What the hell….?” Tommy reached for it but Oliver’s hand closed over it before he could take it. “What’s that doing out here?”

Oliver stuffed the cloth in his pocket. “It must belong to one of the grad students. We knew they were going to be in the area.” But his heart had start pounding, and he couldn’t shake the idea that had come into his head. _It’s not possible._  

“Shit. If they’re this close, it’s going to be one more thing to worry about… Oliver? Are you OK?” Tommy reached out to steady his friend, worried by the sudden change of expression on Oliver’s face.

_Not possible._ Oliver cleared his throat. “Yeah. Look, the Kawani have been hiding from the League for decades. I’m sure a couple of grad students won’t be a problem.” He was speaking on autopilot, his thoughts racing ahead of his words.

“What are the chances that we would cross paths with them in hundreds of miles of nothing?” Tommy turned back in the direction of the plateau, which had emerged in the distance as the snow cleared, and began walking. “And in a blizzard, for Christ’s sake?”

Oliver fell into step behind him. “Incredibly slim,” he said. In his pocket, his hand reflexively tightened on the scrap of cloth. “It would be a miracle.”

 

********************

 

Roy trained his arrow on the figures moving towards them. Felicity, sitting with her back to the snowbank behind which they had taken cover, nudged him.

“Get down! They’re too far away to shoot.  You’re just going to risk them seeing you.”

Roy dropped down next to her and threw his bow on the ground in frustration. “This stupid snow. Everything looks the same. I thought they were five minutes away from us an hour ago.”

Felicity rustled in her pack for a few minutes. When her hand came back out, Roy’s eyes widened indignantly. “You’ve got chocolate? We’ve been eating quinoa bars!”

Felicity broke the bar and offered him half. “I was saving it until we needed it. You know, like, if we lost the will to live. Or knew we were going to die and really, really wanted to enjoy our last couple of seconds. But I think it’s more important to keep you busy so you don’t give away our location by popping up like a damn groundhog every thirty seconds.”

Roy glared at her, but he took the chocolate and, after a moment, leaned his head back against the snowbank. “What are we going to do?”

“What do you mean?” 

“Well, when these guys get close enough…. I mean, what if they’re with the League?”

Felicity shrugged. “Then we know we’re in the right neighborhood.”

“Felicity, I’m saying - if they attack, do we still go by Oliver’s rules? No killing?”

She was silent a long time, gazing straight ahead as though the answer could be found in the endless stretch of white before them. “I don’t know. They didn’t play by those rules when they killed Oliver.”

“The criminals never do. Isn’t that the point? That we’re not criminals?”

Felicity turned to face him. “I don’t know what we are. We came to bring him home, Roy. If they won’t tell us where he is, what happened .... Anyway, we have the element of surprise. If we lose that, the fight might not go our way.”

“So what are you saying? We kill them before they see us coming?”

There was only one answer to give, even though it might be the answer that got them killed. “No. You’re right; we can’t do that. Oliver’s rules.”

Roy didn’t respond, but she sensed the tension leave his body. She couldn’t help but wonder what decision she might have come to if she’d had nothing to guide her but the echo chambers of her own head and heart.

Roy had poked his head up again. Despite her elbow jabbing at him, he squinted at the approaching figures. “What the hell? What is… they’re waving something around. It’s… pink?” Suddenly, he dropped down beside her, his eyes widening as he noticed, for the first time, that her hair wasn’t covered by its habitual splash of color. “Oh shit. Shit shit shit. Felicity... I think we lost the element of surprise.”

She closed her eyes, her stomach churning, her mind racing. “OK. We stay down until we hear them, then we come out firing. If they’re on the lookout for us, we only get one chance. Try not to kill them.” She drew herself into a crouch, notched an arrow, and tried, around the rushing blood in her ears, to listen for the sound of approaching footsteps. “But make your first shot count.”

 

********************

 

The first arrow landed in the snow at Oliver’s feet, and he had his own bow drawn before his brain caught up with him. The second arrow skimmed Tommy’s shoulder. He dropped to his stomach, hidden by the snow, and drew his knife. 

The figures before them emerged like ghosts from the earth itself. They rose from a drift of snow, and in the gray and brown that they wore - different from the robes worn by the League, Oliver automatically registered - they could have been shadows. 

Except that shadows didn’t fire arrows. Both figures were incredibly fast, drawing their next arrow as soon as the first left the bow. The onslaught was deadly - or should have been. Even as he aimed for his own lethal shot - dead center in the slighter figure’s chest - he forced himself to pause. These archers weren’t aiming to kill. More than that, the speed with which they drew and fired, the style of it, was… familiar.

There was no time to think. Oliver lowered his bow and dropped the arrow he had been aiming.

“What are you _doing?”_ Tommy hissed, crouched beside him.

“I don’t know,” said Oliver, and took a slow, cautious step forward as the archers in front of him paused in their onslaught. The taller one pulled off the hood that had kept his face in shadow. His eyes widened as he recognized the figure in front of him and, as though moving underwater, he lowered his own bow.

Oliver closed his eyes and swallowed, hard. He couldn’t breathe. He felt the abyss at his back, the sword in his chest, the knowledge that he would never see her again. _It’s not possible._ He opened his eyes and, afraid to move, certain that he was about to wake up, turned to face the slighter figure.

She wasn’t haloed by a golden glow, as she had been in his vision - and she wasn’t lying lifeless, as she had been in his nightmare. She was real, and more alive than seemed possible in this frozen, black and white world. He hadn’t realized - hadn’t _let_ himself realize - how desperately he had wanted, missed, needed her. But now that she was so close, the need was almost unbearable. He had so wanted to see her, and now seeing her wasn’t enough. He needed to hold her, to taste her, to drown in her.

Every detail of her seemed to shimmer, like a mirage in the desert. She was breathing, hard, her breath clouding the air. Her glasses were slightly askew, and the strands of hair that had escaped her ponytail were plastered against her face by sweat and snow. Slowly, cautiously - afraid that she would vanish as he approached -- Oliver began to close the distance between them.

 

********************

 

Felicity realized that she was dead. Their attack hadn’t worked, and an arrow had found her heart. She wondered if Roy had made it. She hoped he had -- that he would make it back to Thea.

Why had she been fighting so hard to survive? She couldn’t remember. She had come here for Oliver, and now here he was. It was the simplest thing in the world. She felt a moment’s sadness for the people who would miss her - her mother, Digg, Ray. _Ray._ It wasn’t fair that he should lose anyone else.

For some reason, that thought gave her a moment’s pause. She looked to her right. There was Roy, his bow on the ground next to him. She felt the weight of her own bow in her hands. Dead people didn’t hold bows. Dead people didn’t feel the cold, and as she stood and stared at Oliver, she began to shiver.

In the weeks after Oliver’s death, her heart, with its urgent animal instinct to survive, had made her forget what it was to love him. It had buried the memory deep beneath the frozen ground, and it had told her that the campfire warmth that Ray awoke in her was - could be - love.

Now she knew that her heart had lied. Now she remembered. In an instant of nuclear heat, the ground thawed and cracked and her love for Oliver bloomed like a sun. It seared everything else to ash, until nothing was real but him. He could die; he could love someone else; he could say that they would never be together. But Felicity would never forget again, and she would never love anyone else. Not like this. 

He had taken a step towards her. She couldn’t stop shivering. He took another step, and his own bow dropped to his side. She held hers tightly. It was real. The bow was real, and Oliver was standing in front of the bow. Oliver was reaching out for the bow, and it was Oliver’s hand that was lowering it until it, too, dropped into the snow. It was Oliver’s warmth that she could feel, Oliver’s breath on her lips… 

And it was Oliver’s arm that spun her aside and behind him, and Oliver who snatched out of the air the arrow that had been about to strike her in the back. 


	8. Chapter 8

There were two of them, wearing the robes of the League - and not apprentice’s robes. Oliver took an arrow in the shoulder and Felicity was struck in the thigh before they were able to get behind the embankment. Roy, in one smooth movement, scooped up his own bow as he dove for cover, and Tommy, in his own dive for the snow bank, drew a dagger from his boot and threw it, with devastating accuracy, into the upper leg of one of the assassins.

“I hit an artery,” he muttered, his back against the packed snow. “He’ll bleed out in less than a minute.”

“Jesus,” breathed Felicity. Then, as Oliver wrenched out the arrow in his shoulder and prepared to draw, she grabbed her own bow, notched the arrow that Roy passed her, and let it fly. It found its target in the chest of the man who was charging towards them.

“It’s not a lethal shot,” she said, as she dropped down again. “But the arrow is tipped with sedative. He’ll be out for a while.” Then she blinked as her vision blurred. Looking down, she seemed to notice the arrow sticking out of her leg for the first time. “Hey. Ow.”

Oliver caught her as she slowly tipped over. “She’s losing blood. Get me -” but without waiting for instructions, Roy had torn a strip of wool off of the bottom of Oliver’s coat and tied it tightly over the wound. Oliver gently lay Felicity in the snow, leaned over her, and brought his lips close to her ear. His beard tickled her cheek and, instinctively, she turned to him. His eyes were raw with worry. She wanted to reassure him, but couldn’t speak around the sudden lump in her throat.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered.

Bracing one hand in the snow behind her, he gritted his teeth and, with a quick, smooth jerk, pulled the arrow out of her thigh. Pain screamed through her. She gasped and her ears filled with a dull roaring sound. Her vision clouded, and she reached for Oliver as his face seemed to spin away into the distance.

When she became aware of her surroundings again, they had changed. She knew that she had been braced against the snow bank, but now she was warm, and something rough and scratchy was pressed against her face. She blinked and the brown wool of Oliver’s cloak filled her vision. His breath was ragged and hot against her skin as he bent down, wrapping himself around her like a shell, as though by sheer force of will he could insulate her from the lethal cold surrounding them. She could feel his lips move against her ear, but couldn’t make out words, until she realized that he was simply saying her name, over and over, like a prayer. He was holding her so tightly that she couldn’t breathe, and his heart was pounding beneath the layers of wool. It was the sweetest sound she had ever heard. She pressed closer, not caring if she never breathed again.

Finally, she pulled back just far enough to see his face, hard and pinched with fear. His cheeks were wet, and she brushed at them with her hand, clumsily. _He’s going to get frostbite_. Her touch seemed to melt the hard muscles in his jaw and cheeks, and as he looked down at her, his lips curved into the whisper of a smile. She grasped the collar of his cloak in her numb fingers and tried to dry his face, but the cloth was soaked with blood. She wondered, vaguely, if the blood was hers, but didn’t care enough to follow the thought through to its conclusion. If this was how she was going to die - curled in Oliver’s arms, warmed by the heat in his eyes as he looked at her - she just hoped that it would be a slow death.

“Oliver?” Roy’s voice, as quiet and uncertain as it was, pierced the space between Oliver and Felicity like an arrow. The moment shattered and fell around them, and suddenly, Felicity could feel the cold again as it rushed between them. Slowly, she sat up, bracing herself against the inevitable head rush. Oliver, slower to come out of it, sat stunned and blinking as though he had emerged from darkness into sudden light.

She wasn’t dying. That was important - that was good. But there was something else. Her brain was screaming at her to wake up, because this had to be a dream, but she wasn’t waking up, and that could mean only one thing...

The understanding that had been pushed aside in the heat of survival suddenly rushed upon her. Her heart began to pound, and the sound of rushing blood again filled her ears. She saw her own disbelief mirrored in Roy’s face. She opened her mouth to speak, but realized that she was unsure what she wanted to say - any words she could think of shriveled and died next to the magnitude of the one, insurmountable, inarguable fact - Oliver was _alive._ Miraculously, impossibly, _gloriously_ alive.

“You’re… we thought that you… I mean, we really thought…” Roy couldn’t seem to utter the word against which they had hardened themselves in the past week. His jaw worked as though trying to dislodge it.

Oliver looked helplessly at Tommy, who gave him a small smile, as if in silent support. “I know,” he said, and by the time he turned back to Roy, his voice had hardened into a hoarse monotone. Felicity’s heart sank as she recognized the signs - Oliver was unsure what to say, so he was letting the Arrow do the talking. She shivered, wondering if she had imagined the moment when he had held her, the heat and urgency with which he had whispered her name. That warmth was already gone, hidden behind the carefully constructed mosaic of courage and stoicism that was all he was willing to show. She still felt so raw it was as though the wind itself was scraping across every nerve in her body, and the gruff steadiness of his voice made her want to scream. “I know… what you thought. I’m sorry. I couldn’t get a message to you." 

Roy seemed just as happy to have the Arrow back as he had been to have Oliver - or maybe, Felicity thought, there was no difference to him. A slow grin spread across his face, and without warning, he threw himself at Oliver, who caught him in a huge hug, stifling a groan as Roy collided with his wounded shoulder.

“Don’t get the wrong idea,” said Roy, his voice muffled in Oliver’s shoulder. “We’re not all going to swoon in your arms just because you didn’t die.” His voice caught, and Felicity thought she saw a suspicious shine in Oliver’s own eyes before he blinked it quickly away. She stopped herself from pointing out that, so far, Roy was spending at least as much time in Oliver’s arms as she had.

She wanted to take these few moments to reconstruct her walls, her own mosaic of common sense and will, focusing on what had to be done next rather than on the almost unbearable waves of alternating euphoria and loneliness that were colliding in her. Suddenly, the thought hit her like a speeding car. “Digg. Digg!”

The men looked at her blankly, and she rolled her eyes and held her hands before her as though at a loss of how to clarify. “We have to let Digg know. We have to get back and radio him _right now._ ” It was suddenly unbearable to think of Digg living another moment with the belief that they’d all been laboring under.

“We’ve already sent him a message.” Tommy spoke up for the first time. He had seemed, with his silence, to be trying to respect the intimacy of their reunion, but his businesslike tone indicated that he’d given them enough time for privacy. “Actually, it was for all of you, but I guess that part is kind of moot now.” He craned his neck to examine the damage done by Felicity’s arrow. A growing stain on his shoulder testified to her aim. “Nice shot. I’m fine, by the way.” 

But she was too stunned to apologize. She had just looked at him, directly, for the first time, and once again her world tumbled upside down and righted itself, with certain facts shaken into new order. “ _Tommy._ Wait… _are_ we dead?” She looked down at herself as though double checking for mortal wounds.

“Shockingly, no.” Tommy said, coolly. “Though if I’d known that the Queen Consolidated secretary and Oliver Twist had planned to take on the League - not to mention the Arctic - I have to admit that I wouldn’t have put much money on your survival.”

Roy glowered at him, but Felicity decided to let “secretary” go. For now. “We came to bring Oliver home. One way or another.” She glanced sidelong at Roy and shot him a quick grin, which he returned. Neither of them had ever dared to believe that, if they succeeded in finding Oliver, it would end like this. “And now we can.”

But her smile faded as she took in the expression on Oliver’s face. He looked down, as if unable to meet her gaze. “You shouldn’t have come.”

Roy started to object, but Felicity understood what Oliver meant. Not that they shouldn’t have come because it was too dangerous, or because success had been such a long shot.

Oliver had no intention of coming home. 

“Why not?” she said, stiffly. She needed to hear him say it.

“I can’t come home.” Though Roy’s face darkened, Oliver looked only at Felicity, as though it was her that he needed to convince. “Not yet. Maybe not ever. Not while Ra’s al Ghul is still alive.”

Understanding dawned on her face slowly as the color drained from it. “You’re still planning on fighting him?” Her voice was low and icy.

Tommy and Oliver exchanged a glance. “I’m planning on fighting him _again_ , yes.”

“So you’ve already fought, and he survived?” The ice in her voice cracked under panic as she scanned Oliver again for visible wounds. “And you’re going to face him again, anyway? _Why?”_

“Because as long as he’s alive, he’s a threat. Not only to Thea, Felicity. To the whole city. To anyone I care about.” His eyes were pleading.

“Oliver,” she whispered. “ _Please._ Just come home. We can fight Ra’s from there. Digg and the others can help. I can’t… “ her voice broke but she swallowed and went on. “I can’t let you go again.”

Roy spoke up, and though his cheeks were darkly flushed and his jaw was set, his voice was calm and even. “She’s right. We can take Ra’s. We can take on the whole League, but we need to do it from Starling City.”

Oliver hesitated. Tommy looked at him, alarmed to see him considering it, and his own face hardened. “Oliver, we promised we’d come back. I’m keeping that promise. You can do what you want.”

“Promised _who?_ ” Felicity snapped at Tommy. She would have given anything to have him far away from here. If she could just get Oliver alone, maybe there was a chance of talking him into coming home. He wanted to - she could see it in the way he avoided Tommy’s gaze, in the practiced stillness that she had learned to recognize as his version of restlessness. “Ra’s? Who is there to promise?”

Oliver sighed, heavily. The snow had cleared completely and the sun was coming out, casting their shadows against the bright snow and making them visible from miles away.

“Look, we need to get under cover, and we need to patch ourselves up.” he said. “Let’s dig in and get warm. Felicity, Roy, once I’ve filled you in - on everything - if you still think it makes more sense to fight from home....” Felicity’s heart skipped a beat at the way his voice softened when he spoke the word.

Tommy’s eyes narrowed, but he stayed silent, until a thought seemed to occur to him. “Um…”  He nodded towards the other side of the snow bank, where the two League members lay motionless. “Any ideas on what to do with the corpses?”

 

********************

 

As it turned out, they weren’t corpses - at least, not both of them. The one that Felicity had hit was struggling to rise when they got to him, and Oliver struck him on the head with a swift, efficient blow that rendered him unconscious, but not dead. In the end, Tommy and Oliver dragged both assassins about a mile west of their own trail, and dug a snow cave to hide the bodies. They wrapped the living assassin in one of Felicity and Roy’s furs.

Oliver evaluated their work. “We’ll just have to hope he doesn’t freeze to death.”

Tommy gave Oliver a pointed look. He had retrieved his dagger from the dead assassin and it was back in his boot. “You know that he’s got as much of a chance of dying as he does of living. And if he does survive and wake up before we’ve moved on, he could cause us a lot of trouble.”

Beneath his hood, Oliver’s face was in shadow. He stared at the supine figure for a long moment. Then he shook his head abruptly. “No. I’m doing this to get home, Tommy. If I start killing people to do that, how can I say that it’s really me who’s getting there?”

Tommy roughly ran his hand through his hair. “Shit, Oliver. You’re right. …I _know_ you’re right. But…”  His voice was low and rough, almost angry, and the hand that dropped to his side had clenched into a hard fist. “Seeing you with Felicity reminded me what I’m fighting for, too. I want to get home to her, Oliver. I _need_ to. I’m getting desperate.”

They turned back in silence. There was nothing to say. Oliver hadn’t realized how desperate _he_ had been, until he saw Felicity and the burning knot of need had uncoiled all at once. If the assassins had attacked before that, he couldn’t say he might not have killed them without a second thought.

And there was something else - something more than the easing of the desperation that he had carried, unknowing, since he walked away from her to his death. Knowing that he _wasn’t_ dying - that he was coming back to her, and would bring back to her the truth of all that he had done - reminded him of why he had stopped killing in the first place: in order to become a man who could bear to see his own reflection in the eyes of the people he loved.

But it was easier for him. Tommy was still a thousand eyes away from Laurel. And soon, Oliver’s traitor mind whispered, _he_ would be that far from Felicity again. He desperately wanted that - to keep her safe. And at the same time, even these few moments out of her sight felt like torture. He didn’t know how he would survive letting her go, but he knew he could never survive what might happen if he let her stay. 

They returned to find that Felicity and Roy had created a makeshift tent that blended with the shadow of the embankment, lining the snow wall and ground with fur and using sealskin as a cover. Their bodies warmed it quickly, so that they could sit still without shivering. By the time Tommy and Oliver rejoined them, Felicity was cautiously putting weight on her leg, and was able to hobble without too much pain, thanks to the algae compress that Oliver had left her with.

Once everyone’s wounds had been tended, Roy and Felicity sat with their back against the snow wall, while Tommy and Oliver sat across from them. Oliver couldn’t shake the feeling that they were opponents in a game, waiting for someone to make the first move. His instincts told him to wait it out - let the other side show their hand first.

 _No_. He had been on the battlefield for too long. There were no opponents here, no enemies. He could make a move, leave himself open. He drew a deep breath.

“I’m not dead. But I should be.”

He told the whole story, even details that seemed unimportant. He needed to prove to himself, to _remind_ himself, that he could still let down his guard with them - his team. When he described his fight with Ra’s, he avoided Felicity’s gaze. He remembered her injunction to kill rather than be killed, and knew had let her down. He wondered if he would ever be able to tell her the whole truth - that he hadn’t fought as hard as he had promised he would; that he had been ready to die and leave her forever.

When Tommy got to the part of his own survival story involving his father, Felicity and Roy exchanged looks.

“What?” he said. 

“Nothing,” said Roy, slowly. “It’s just…odd. Merlyn’s the reason that we’re all here.”

Felicity spoke up. “He brought you here to save you, and sent Oliver to save Thea… and now Roy and I are here to save Oliver. I wonder how much of this he had planned.” 

Oliver frowned. “He couldn’t have planned on you guys coming.”

“Maybe not.” Felicity shrugged, but her face was thoughtful.

“Besides,” said Tommy, “he planned for me to join the League, not the Kawani.”

“I guess… wait, _what?_ ” Felicity blinked.

“The Kawani. They’re the first nation -”

“I know who they _are._ They vanished 50 years ago!”

Now it was Oliver and Tommy’s turn to exchange a look. “Not exactly.”

Felicity and Roy listened incredulously as Tommy and Oliver described the Kawani’s underground existence. The major hurdles now gotten over, the rest of the story didn’t take long.

“So… your plan depends on using a subterranean algae that may or may not be magical to kill a man who can’t be killed?” Felicity tilted her head.

“Well… yeah.” Oliver wished that he could read her. He didn’t usually have a problem with that - her feelings had always shimmered just beneath the surface, revealed in her luminous eyes and the flush of her skin. Now, she sat still and pale. He wished that it was just the two of them in the tent, if only for a moment, so he could ask her what she was thinking.

Roy broke into his thoughts. “I still think it makes more sense to fight from Starling, man. We’ve got help there. And home court advantage.”

But Oliver was shaking his head. His momentary impulse to give into their, and his own, yearning for home had passed. “No. It’s not that simple. It isn’t just the League who are a threat right now. I didn’t tell you this, Tommy, but before we left, Katherine pulled me aside and...well, threatened us.” As he told the story, Tommy’s eyes widened in disbelief, and when he finished, the latter shook his head.

“I don’t believe it. Katherine would never hurt Felicity or Laurel. She knows how much….” his sentence trailed off, and Oliver finished it for him.

“How much they mean to us. Exactly. Think of how much defeating Ra’s al Ghul means to _her._ I believe that she doesn’t want to hurt anyone, Tommy, and I believe she genuinely cares about us. But if she thinks that our help will make the difference between winning and losing… I also believe she’s capable of it.” He knew that the Kawani had become Tommy’s family when he had no one else, and he watched the struggle on his friend’s face. “I’m sorry.”

“That’s not the only reason to have the fight here,” said Felicity, reluctantly. “Ra’s al Ghul is only powerful while he’s on this land, right? So he won’t come to Starling City. Ever. He’ll keep sending the League, and we’ll keep fighting them, and it will go on for as long as he’s alive. Which, according to you guys, will be pretty much forever.”

Oliver looked down. He was grateful that Felicity had come to the conclusion on her own, but he didn’t want to see the look on her face when she realized that they would be saying goodbye again. When she spoke again, it took a moment for the grim determination on his own face to crack into disbelief at her words.

“There’s no choice,” she said, conviction in her voice. “We’ll have to fight him here.”

 

********************

 

When Digg arrived at the basement, the lights were already on, and Ray was standing at the central workstation, frowning as he flipped through the faces that made up Oliver’s list.

“Um… that’s really for authorized personnel only.” Digg holstered the gun that he had drawn on seeing the lights. 

“Yeah, I kinda feel like paying for it authorized me.” Ray didn’t look up, and the preoccupied frown didn’t slip.

“Fair enough.” Digg joined Ray at the screen. “So why do you look like you’re mad at it? If dealing with criminals puts you in a bad mood, you’re in the wrong line of work.” He suspected he knew what was really at the root of Ray’s bad mood. They hadn’t heard from Felicity and Roy since Ray’s pilot had returned with the message that they had landed safely and would be in touch when they knew something about Oliver.

So Digg was surprised when Ray muttered, “Someone put him up to it.”

“Someone put who up to what?”

“Connor. Someone put him up to the whole mind control thing.” 

“What makes you say that?” Digg had learned not to dismiss a theory out of hand just because it sounded far-fetched. He and Oliver had dealt with some pretty far-fetched stuff over the years.

“Roy asked him how it worked, and he didn’t know.” Ray closed the document showing the faces on Oliver’s list, and instead opened the link that Felicity had established to Starling PD’s files. He began scanning through recent arrests. “If he’d invented it, he would have known.”

“OK, so… what, he had a sidekick? Someone who did the technical stuff from behind the scenes?”

“I don’t know… “ Ray spoke slowly. “There was something else, something that obviously meant something to Roy.”

“Meant what?” Digg sat in Felicity’s chair and watched as Ray scanned through the files, his face set in a mask of fierce concentration. He could feel himself beginning to relax into his old rhythm… asking the questions, posing the objections, tugging on the fabric of the theory to find the loose threads.

“I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the kid isn’t really a sharer. He didn’t say what it was that freaked him out. Connor said something about an island?”

Digg frowned. “Lian Yu? Where Oliver was stranded?”

“I don’t know. He said that Slade Wilson was locked up there.” Ray looked at Digg’s carefully immobile expression and nodded, matter-of-factly. “Yup. That’s the same expression he had. That ‘nope, nothing to see here,’ face. What the hell, Digg? You guys have Slade Wilson locked up on an island somewhere?” Ray’s own face darkened, and Digg remembered that Slade’s army had killed Ray’s fiance. 

“Not somewhere.” Digg paused, and then decided that Ray had more than proven that he could be trusted. “Lian Yu. It’s not just an island - it’s a prison. For the worst of the worst. People the government can’t afford to keep where they might have access to the outside world. Slade Wilson is in a windowless cell 50 feet below the ground on a deserted island in the North China Sea. No one is supposed to know that - no one but us and A.R.G.U.S. So how does some punk kid find out about it?” He pulled out his phone. “I have to tell Lyla. If Lian Yu is no longer secure…”

“No, wait.” Ray turned back to the computer and, with a few keystrokes, pulled up an image of the beach at Lian Yu. “Look, we can use satellite imagery to monitor it. If anything looks odd, we can call in the A.R.G.U.S. troops.”

“By then it might be too late!” Digg shook his head, decisively. “Why take that risk?”

“Because there’s something going on here, Digg. Something bigger than Connor, and we have to figure out what it is. If A.R.G.U.S. busts in and evacuates Lian Yu, we’ll spook whoever it was who put Connor up to getting imprisoned there. Worse, if they’ve heard of the prison but don’t know where it is, we’ll tip them off to its location.”

Digg frowned. “So your theory is that there’s some shadowy figure out there who invented Connor’s device and gave it to him to wreak havoc, just so that he’d get imprisoned on Lian Yu? To, what, figure out where it was? Get a man on the inside? What’s the good of that if you can’t communicate with him?”

Ray looked thoughtful for a moment, and then spun back around to face the workstation. His fingers flew as he searched police files, prison blueprints, and logs from local radio stations. Finally, he slammed his fist against the edge of the desk. “ _Dammit._ We really need Felicity here. I just don’t have the skill to…” He began typing again, but more slowly and methodically. Digg suspected that Ray’s frustration might be about missing more than Felicity’s hacking skills, but he tactfully remained silent.

Finally, Ray looked up, triumphant. “There! It’s weak, but it’s there. A radio signal being emitted from Iron Heights.”

Digg looked over his shoulder at the small, pulsing point hovering over the Glades. “How is that possible? No way they’d let someone like him have a radio.”

“Maybe they didn’t. Maybe it’s just a transmitter. If it was small enough, they could implant it on him…”

“Who?” Digg shook his head in frustration. “We’re talking in circles. The shadowy figure is the one who implanted the radio transmitter and put Connor up to his crimes. Whoever gave Connor his device knows about Lian Yu and thought that Connor could help him locate it. But we still don’t know the most important thing - who is the shadowy figure?”

Once more, Ray touched the screen and brought up the faces on Oliver’s list. He scrolled through them thoughtfully, as though waiting for one to speak up and claim responsibility. “Someone who’s desperate to locate Slade Wilson.” 


	9. Chapter 9

Felicity was prepared for a fight, but she was surprised to find Tommy on her side.

“Oliver, it makes sense.” He gestured across the table as though Felicity and Roy were evidence in a court case. “You saw them - they can both fight.” He nodded at Felicity. “And she can think, too.”

“I’m sitting _right_ here, man,” Roy said, mildly.

“No, I mean - not just about strategy. About other stuff - science stuff. She might be able to help Kaya in her research. The more we know about the algae, the better our chance of using it against Ra’s al Ghul.”

Felicity watched Oliver’s face as, eyes darting between her and Tommy, he realized he was going to lose this fight. Unsurprisingly, he changed his line of attack. “How is it that you _can_ fight, by the way?” he asked, glaring at Felicity. “I don’t remember you knowing your way around a bow and arrow back in Starling.”

She carefully avoided looking at Roy. “That’s not the point right now.”

“I taught her,” said Roy, defiantly. “So did Digg. And Thea. So if you want to blame anyone, you’re going to have to blame everyone.”

“Why are you trying to blame anyone?” Felicity asked, exasperated. “I already had this fight with Digg and I’m _not_ going to have it again with you, Oliver. I learned to fight because I needed to be able to protect myself.” _Because you weren’t there._ “Why is everyone else allowed to do that, and I’m not?”

Oliver closed his eyes and exhaled slowly through clenched teeth as he fought his inner demons - and won. “Because…” he said, slowly, “I don’t want you to _have_ to protect yourself. I want to be there to do it. Always.” Though his words were forced out through gritted teeth, they made Felicity’s heart skip a beat. “And that’s not realistic, or fair.” He opened his eyes and looked first to her, then to Roy. “I’m sorry.”

Tommy, who still seemed braced for a fight, looked at Oliver, stunned. “Holy shit,” he said. “That was mature.” He turned to Felicity. “What did you do to him?”

“Shut up, Tommy.” Oliver shifted his attention back to Felicity, and again she saw his mind, racing behind the cool stare, evaluate the terrain and switch tactics. “Look, maybe it makes sense for Roy to stay. But Felicity, Digg needs you back in Starling City. He might be able to out-fight the criminals without us, but there’s no way he can out-think them without you.” He looked so grimly satisfied at his logic that Felicity was almost sorry to refute it. Besides, she realized, overturning this particular argument was going to require some delicate wording.

“Oliver, we thought all of this through before we left. You think we would have left Digg on his own?” Felicity spoke hesitantly. “...We brought in some outside help.”

Oliver frowned, and Felicity recognized the iciness in his tone. It usually preceded an explosion of some sort.  “Who? Barry?”

“Um... no. Computers aren’t really Barry’s thing.”

Oliver breathed out. “Cisco? Caitlin?”

Roy and Felicity exchanged a look. Felicity felt her mouth go dry. When they had made the decision to accept Ray’s help, she had never believed that she would ever have to break the news to Oliver. She tried to remind herself that this was good news, the result of finding Oliver alive. Sitting across from him now, avoiding his suspicious gaze and bracing herself for the explosion to come, the thought was cold comfort. Roy cleared his throat. 

“Um.” It came out as a hoarse whisper, and he tried again. “No. It’s - Ray.”

“Ray.” Oliver’s voice had been cold before, but now it seemed to lower the temperature in the tent by several degrees. “The man who organized the hostile takeover of Queen Consolidated. Your _boss._ ” He spit the word as though it tasted bad.

Felicity started to retort that being unanimously voted in by the QC board didn’t sound very hostile, but Roy, looking pleadingly at her, made another attempt to keep the peace. “He’s sort of been helping out. It was a team decision, Oliver.”

But Oliver was still glaring at Felicity, and it was clear that he considered this _her_ betrayal. “I can’t believe you would get him involved. It’s dangerous - for you _and_ for him. What possibly could have possessed you?”

Heat rose to her cheeks. “Starling City was under attack, and he had certain… tools and skills. Digg and Roy agreed, so we brought him in.”

Roy chimed in, doggedly. “Look, Oliver, I thought it was a bad idea at first too, but we were lucky to have him. I’d probably be dead if he hadn’t had my back. That’s the truth.” He jutted out his chin and his eyes, blazing with defiance, reminded Felicity of the street kid they had met so long ago. He was devoted to Oliver, but it was clear that he wasn’t going to throw Ray under the bus. “He’s a good guy. I trust him.”

The statement had its effect. Again, Oliver seemed to be engaged in an internal battle, but this time, it wasn’t resolved so easily. “Does he know who I am?” His voice was low, almost a growl.

Roy and Felicity looked at each other for a long moment. She lost. “He figured it out.”

“ _Dammit,_ Felicity!” Oliver exploded.

“What should we have done, Oliver? Let the city burn down around us?” Her own voice rose as she remembered those first horrible weeks, when they had made the choice to survive without him.

Oliver went on as if she hadn’t spoken. “It wasn’t your secret to tell. It’s just like with Barry - you thought you knew best so you acted recklessly.”

“You mean the time I saved your life? When you would have _died_ if Barry hadn’t helped you?” Her own voice was low, dangerous, all peacekeeping forgotten.

“That wasn’t your call then, and it isn’t now!” Tommy placed a warning hand on Oliver’s arm, but he shook it off.

Felicity took a deep breath, her eyes glittering with anger. “We - _the team_ \- made the decision that we thought was best. Because you were dead, Oliver. You were _dead_. I’m not going to apologize for doing what we had to.” She stood up. “I _am_ going to step outside for a minute, and give you a chance to get your head _out of your ass_ before we continue this conversation.”

“Felicity, it’s not safe….” Roy spoke half-heartedly.

“I’ll keep to the shadows.” She glared. “But right now, I prefer the League to _him.”_

It had only been a couple of hours since she’d found out that he was alive, and she already wanted to throttle him. As the stinging air cooled her cheeks, she wondered if it was only jealousy that drove Oliver to act like such a spoiled child. She thought about what it had been like for her to watch him and Sara together - how her chest had hurt every time they looked at one another, every time they touched. But she had put it aside, because it was best for the team. She never took it out on him, and she never took it out on Sara - she had briefly taken it out on herself, she had to admit, but even that hadn’t lasted long. And ultimately, when Sara had died, Felicity had lost a friend, too.

Even so, if his anger had only been due to jealousy, she thought she would be able to stay calm, to let it blow over. But it was something more than that. It was distrust, arising from the part of him that had never accepted being a member of a team - the part that still saw himself as the Vigilante, alone and outnumbered, raging against the world. Would he ever learn to trust Felicity, with his whole being, to take care of herself and the team? And if he couldn’t, would she ever be able to be with him - really be with him - the way she wanted to be?

The tent rustled behind her. “I’m sorry,” said Oliver, gruffly. “You had no choice.”

Without turning around, she said, “Yes, I did.”

“What?” She heard him come to a stop, startled. She turned toward him.

“I said, yes, I did. I did have a choice. I could have left him out of it. I could have let Roy go out to fight alone. Should I have done that?”

Oliver dropped his eyes.

“And before that, there were choices. When I was hiding in my apartment, acting like I was dead, _wishing_ I was dead - because _you_ were dead - and Digg came to beg me for my help saving the city, I could have said no. That was a choice.”

Now Oliver looked at her again, and his face clouded. “I’m sorry. I know what you went through -"

“You... what _?_ ” Her cheeks flushed and then went pale, as if he had slapped her. “You do? You know what I went through?” She almost hissed the words. “You were dead, Oliver. I _mourned_ you. Don’t you _dare_ tell me that you know what I went through. And _don’t_ presume to judge the choices I made to survive - to help the people around me survive. I didn’t have to ask Ray for help. But I did, and I won’t apologize for it. Because he helped us when you couldn’t.” This knocked the wind out of Oliver more effectively than if she had punched him, and his eyes widened with pain, but she went on. “Ray is why I’m still here. He’s why I’m standing in front of you. Because he helped us survive, and then he helped us want to survive. So you can be pissed at the guy who helped save us, but I won’t be. And I _will not_ apologize.”

When Oliver finally spoke, his voice was low, but soft, with none of the Arrow’s habitual growl. “I don’t know what to say.”

With his wounded, earnest eyes seeking hers, Felicity tried to hold on to her rapidly ebbing rage. It was so much cleaner, so much easier to deal with, than the feelings that came flooding into its place. “Yes, you do. You just don’t want to.”

“I’m sorry.” She wondered if she had ever heard him say it before, at least with such simple sincerity. “You’re right. I don’t know what it was like for you. I didn’t think -” he shook his head. “No. That’s not true. I thought about you all the time. You were _all_ I thought about.” His eyes, as he took a step closer to her, were a raw mix of agony and desire. Her heart began to pound again, and this time it had nothing to do with anger. “But I didn’t let myself think about what you were going through. I’m know that’s selfish. But Felicity, if I had - if I had pictured you there, without me, _needing_ me, maybe in pain…” His voice broke, and impulsively, she moved towards him, slowly, like a hunter approaching a wild animal. She tilted her head up and felt his breath, coming more quickly now, hot on her lips. He didn’t move, but his eyes, clear now and as green as the spring, fluttered closed as though, exhausted, he could finally rest in her nearness. She kept her own eyes open, still on some level frightened that this was all a dream, that if she closed them she would wake up in her apartment in Starling City, or a cold tent, huddled next to Roy - somewhere in a world without Oliver.

When she couldn’t bear it anymore - being so close and still so far away - she stepped back.  He kept his eyes closed for a moment, unwilling to let her go, but when he finally opened them they were as inscrutable as they had been when she had first met him - when all she was to him was a secretary with some very convenient skills. She breathed out, one quick huff of impatience.

“OK then. I accept your apology. So let’s stop fighting, and just focus on what’s in front of us. So we can get _home_.” The word barely fit around the lump in her throat. “And then you can go back to yelling at me for things that aren’t my fault, and apologizing for it later, like the good old days. _After_ we’ve beaten Ra’s al Ghul.” Oliver looked away, but she persisted. “Oliver, you know that you have a better chance against him with me here. Why won’t you admit it?”

“Because I’m scared.” His voice was low. “I’m scared of what could happen. What if you turn back, alone, and the League finds you? Or what if you stay, and Katherine or Ra’s al Ghul decides to use you against me? I don’t know what to do.” He held his hands in front of him, empty, helpless. “I don’t know how to protect you, and I can’t lose you." 

She wanted to reassure him, but she didn’t know how. And she knew that if she closed the gap between them, like she yearned to, it would only raise questions that neither of them was ready to answer yet. He looked at her longingly, but seemed to come to the same conclusion. Finally, with a half-hearted attempt at levity, he held out his hand. “How about this - I promise to stop being a jerk, and you promise to make it home alive.” 

It was the same promise she had made to Ray; It was just as unfair, and just as necessary, to make it now. “Deal.” His hand closed around hers and, for a moment, she let herself forget about the League and the Kawani, Tommy and Roy, Digg and Ray and Starling City.

 

********************

 

“So,” said Tommy, sizing Roy up. “You’re sleeping with my sister.”

“What? No!” Roy sputtered.

“I think I was more OK with that before I knew she was my sister.”

“OK, first of all? It’s none of your business. Second of all, I’m not… anymore. I… kind of screwed that up.” Roy pulled his blanket more tightly around him. The tent was already growing colder without Felicity and Oliver.

“Messed around on her?” Tommy’s face darkened in a way that didn’t seem altogether fair to Roy, given that he’d only been Thea’s brother for about a year. Roy remembered that the last time Tommy had seen him, he’d been a street kid who’d recently blown off a job opportunity at Verdant. Tommy didn’t have any reason to think well of him. Still, there was such as thing as innocent until proven guilty.

“No!” What the hell, Roy thought. They might all die before they made it home. No real point in keeping secrets. “I loved her… love her. She found out that I was working for the Arrow after I’d sworn that I wasn’t. She couldn’t trust me anymore, and I couldn’t blame her. We’re friends now, but…”

Tommy sat in silence, contemplating the misery that Roy wasn’t trying to hide. “Man,” he said, sympathetically. “Proximity to Oliver really does a number on your love life, doesn’t it?”

Roy shook his head, sharply. “It’s not his fault. Things around him are… intense, and sometimes that brings up hard choices. But we’re the ones who make them. We screw up on our own.” He nodded towards the tent flap, where Oliver and Felicity’s voices had fallen to a murmur. “So does he.” After a moment, something occurred to him. “How long have you known?”

“That Thea was my sister? My father told me when he thought I might die. I don’t know if it was some kind of confession, or if he thought it would make me feel… less alone, somehow.” Tommy shrugged. “My dad has a weird sense of right and wrong. Anyway, I had to forget about some ideas that I had around the time she turned 18, but generally, I was pretty happy about the news.”

He broke off when the tent flap opened and Felicity ducked in, followed by Oliver.

“OK,” said Oliver, brusquely. His face was set and gave no indication of what had transpired outside the tent. “You guys are right, I’m wrong.” Tommy raised his eyebrows but wisely refrained from comment. “We head out tonight. Together. In the meantime, let’s all try to get some sleep.”

As they lay out their mats, Oliver pulled the pink bandana from his pocket. “I almost forgot.” He smoothed it out and tied the cloth around Felicity’s ponytail, giving it a little tug. She grimaced and reached up to adjust it.

“But I thought that belonged to the grad… _oh._ ” Tommy tapped his forehead with the heel of his hand. “I just got that.” 

“How did you guys know about the grad student story?” Felicity asked as she climbed into her sleeping bag.

“Rocky told us,” said Oliver, wryly.

Roy brightened. “You know Rocky?”

Oliver and Tommy explained their run-in with Rocky at Harvey’s cabin as they adjusted their blankets.

“So you guys… spent some time with him?” Oliver busied himself stowing his bow where he would be able to access it if he woke up suddenly.

“And his dimple?” Tommy rolled his eyes.

“We probably would have died if it weren’t for the gear he gave us,” said Felicity, loyally. “All of this stuff - at least, the stuff that actually keeps us warm - is from him.”

“Oh, yeah. Great guy,” said Roy, enthusiastically. “Gives terrible advice, but _great_ taste in men.”

Felicity rolled her eyes. “Oh my god. _Never_ tell him someone likes him. His ego will literally explode.”

“Oh,” said Oliver. Then, “ _Oh._ ”

Tommy grinned and nudged Oliver before lying down. “See? Harmless. I told you he was a nice guy. We were right to trust him.”

“We gave him our mail for Starling City,” explained Oliver.

“So did I,” said Roy. The mention of Starling City had sobered him. He pictured Thea, alone in her palatial apartment, worrying over Oliver. He wondered if she would get his letter, and if she did, whether she would care. “He’ll get it started, at least. Who knows how long it will take to get there.”

Oliver nodded towards the pink bandana. “Doesn’t seem like the best choice to blend in with the landscape,” he observed. Roy wondered if, guessing at his thoughts, Oliver was changing the subject to offer him the only privacy possible in this cramped space.

“I like it,” she said, defensively. “Roy got it for me. I wear my hood over it so it won’t stand out.”

Tommy kicked Roy’s leg. “Nice gift. Are you trying to get her killed?”

“It seemed important at the time.” Roy shrugged. “It was symbolic.”

Oliver was the last to lie down. “What was it supposed to symbolize?”

Roy crossed his arms behind his head and closed his eyes, picturing Thea - the way she dragged her fingers through her hair when she was thinking, the way she looked at him from beneath her lashes when she thought no one looking, as if seeing right through what he showed the world and reading the writing on the underside of his heart. In the cooling tent, with the breath of the others growing soft and even as they drifted off to sleep, he folded his arms in front of him, trying to draw the image closer and warm himself with it. He whispered the word, like a secret or a prayer.   

“Hope.”


	10. Chapter 10

When Felicity woke up, she was shivering and Tommy and Oliver were packing their mats. Roy was snoring softly beside her.

“We thought we’d let you sleep as long as possible,” Oliver explained, tossing her a blanket that had gotten bunched up at her feet. He stepped over Roy, kicking him lightly as he went. “Wakey, wakey.”

Roy muttered and rolled over in his sleep. “He’s kind of a heavy sleeper,” Felicity said, apologetically. She elbowed him sharply and he sat up, looking around bleary-eyed, and noticed that Tommy and Oliver were ready to get going.

“You should have woken us up sooner,” he said, annoyed, as he began cramming his scattered belongings into his pack.

“He’s also not super fun to be around before you’ve fed him.” Felicity tossed a granola bar at Roy, who glared at her but picked it up and tore off the wrapper.

They finished packing in silence. When Oliver lifted the sealskin that had been covering their heads, Felicity could see that the stars were already emerging. As she tightened the drawstring on her pack, Oliver crouched down beside her.

“How’s your leg?” he asked. His tone was nonchalant but he was watching her closely for signs of pain.

“Fine,” she said, honestly. “A little stiff, but I’ve barely noticed since I’ve been awake. How’s your shoulder?”

Oliver shrugged to demonstrate his range of motion and grinned at her. “Miracle algae.”

“Miracle algae,” she agreed.

“My arm is fine, too,” said Tommy, loudly. “You know, where you shot me. Healing up nicely. I wish you wouldn’t make such a fuss.”

“Baby,” muttered Roy. Felicity threw another granola bar at him. 

His temper improved as they started walking. “You guys always travel at night?” he asked. 

“Well, you saw what happens if the League catches up with us.” Tommy cast a hunted look at the landscape surrounding them. “They’re pretty pissed that Oliver got away from them, and they’re not much happier with me for helping him escape.”

“We’ve been lucky that they didn’t spot us,” Felicity admitted. “Or maybe they did, but they didn’t bother with us. Maybe they figured we were harmless.”

“They figured wrong,” said Oliver, a trace of pride in his voice.

They walked on in silence. In her focus on surviving it, Felicity hadn’t realized before how beautiful the tundra actually was. In moonlight, the snow that was blinding during the day glowed gently, ghost-like. The stars overlooked the landscape like benevolent lords. Felicity tilted her face upwards and imagined that she could feel the gentle, reflected light.

In the past few months, she had been so focused on Oliver - first on losing him, and then on finding him - that the rest of the world had become reduced to a list of things she needed to take care of and things she could safely ignore. Now, with Oliver walking by her side, suddenly she could see beyond him again, to the wild beauty surrounding her. She remembered why she had started this work in the first place - because the world had seemed to be a place worth saving.

“So how are things in Starling City?” Tommy’s voice shattered the silence so suddenly that Felicity started. She didn’t know him well, but she thought that she could detect an undercurrent in his tone.

“We’ve had our ups and downs,” said Roy, carefully.

“What does that mean?” Definitely an undercurrent. Felicity recalled that Tommy had dated Laurel for a while, and wondered if he was carrying as hot of a torch as Oliver had brought home from the island.

“It means that the Arrowcave got attacked by zombies and we had to re-build it from scratch.” Felicity figured that she might as well get the bad news over with. Seeing Tommy tense, she rushed on, “but no one that we know was hurt.”

“Zombies?” Oliver spoke in a tone that was too polite to be skeptical.

“Yes,” said Felicity, at the same time that Roy said, “No.”

“OK, well, if your definition of a zombie is a mobile human body without attendant human emotions and motivations, which mine _is_ , then yeah, totally zombies,” Felicity insisted.

“But if your definition of zombies is zombies, then no.” Roy rolled his eyes.

“But everyone is OK?” Tommy interrupted.

“Wait, people invaded the basement? What kept them from telling everyone what they saw down there?” Oliver had slowed and turned to Felicity and Roy, frowning.

“They were high. Basically. No one seems to remember anything about it. Look, we’ll tell you all about it sometime, but everything’s pretty much OK. No one remembers anything… Oh. Except for Thea.” The words were out before Felicity could stop them.

Oliver turned on Roy. “ _Thea knows?_ ”

“I didn’t tell her! I wanted to,” Roy admitted. “But Digg and Felicity convinced me to wait. Then when Thea saved Felicity...”

Now Oliver turned back to Felicity. “Why did you need saving?” 

“Because of the zombies,” Felicity explained, patiently.

There was a long pause.

“Look, we’ve got all night,” said Tommy, finally. “You may as well start at the beginning.”

They did. Felicity didn’t linger on the details of finding out about Oliver’s death, or her own retreat afterwards. As it was, Oliver was practically jumping out of his skin with frustration as they described having to take on Connor and his Vertigo device without him.  

“Well, did you think that the criminals were going to go on vacation just because you were out of commission?” Felicity asked reasonably.

“If they knew what was good for them, they would have,” growled Oliver. 

Felicity frowned. “I’m not sure that logic….” she trailed off under the force of Oliver’s glare. “You’re right,” she said, soothingly. “Those criminals are going to be _sorry_ that they didn’t wait for you to get home and catch them.”

“Anyway, then we took out Connor while Felicity and Digg fought off the zombies - I mean, intruders - and Thea rescued Felicity. Did you know Thea can fight, by the way?” Roy’s voice was studiously casual.

“Yeah, I kind of… figured it out just before I left.”

“Merlyn trained her.” Felicity shivered.

“Cold?” Oliver started to shrug off his pack to get out another layer for her.

“No. I just… I don’t like to think about Merlyn training her. I don’t think I agree with his methods.” Felicity remembered Thea’s tears against her neck and was thankful that Roy and Oliver didn’t know the details. It was hard for even her to think about Merlyn “training” the younger girl, despite how strong she knew her to be. She imagined that it would be worse for Thea’s big brother and… whatever Roy was to her these days.

Oliver broke in to her thoughts. He had been frowning meditatively, and now he turned to Roy. “‘We?’”

“Hm?” Roy, too, was lost in thought, and under other circumstances Felicity might have been tempted to laugh at how they all pursued their separate lines of thought, only occasionally intersecting.

But Oliver’s line of thought was one that she had hoped he would pass by. “You said ‘we’ took out Connor. But Felicity, Digg and Thea were all back in the basement. So someone swept in to save the day?” Even as he asked the question, his wry tone told Felicity that he already knew the answer. “So who was the hero of the hour?”  

 

********************

 

Ray dropped lightly onto the rooftop. From here, he could look out over all of the Glades: the flickering of bar signs, the blue-white glow spilling from convenience stores - and block after block of blackness, broken only by flickering trash can fires, in the areas that had been abandoned in the aftermath of the earthquake.

Idly, Ray wondered if he could do something about that - fund some kind of community rejuvenation project, backed by him but driven by the neighborhood. His mind spun in a million directions as it always did at the beginning of a new project, calculating costs and contemplating logistics. Community members could vote on zoning in those no-man’s-lands, and Ray could front loans for housing developments and small business start-ups…

“Hey. You paying attention?” Digg’s voice rumbled in his ear, snapping him back to the task at hand. 

“Sorry, yeah. I was just checking the perimeter, making sure no one’s around.” 

“Who’s going to be around on the roof of Iron Heights?” 

“I don’t know - a concurrent prison break? That would be awkward.” 

“We’re not breaking him out. We just need to talk to him. Now, focus up - Laurel’s going to text when she’s got the west wing guards distracted.”

“And how is she going to do that, exactly?” Ray had been surprised when Digg had suggested including Oliver’s ex in the plan, but Laurel had been more than willing to help - apparently, she was open to slightly more fluid interpretations of legality than Ray would have expected from an Assistant DA.

“Surprise inspection. There really have been a lot of fights and assaults here lately, and some state witnesses have been jeopardized. It’s not totally out of line for her to express an interest in how they do cell inspections, ensure prisoner safety, that kind of thing. She’s going to request an impromptu cell check.”

“ADAs have the right to do that?”

“Nope. But we’re hoping the guards don’t know that. So they start at the far west end, just beneath you, and then they’ll move east. It should take about 25 minutes before they make it back to their regular patrol, so you’ll have to make the time count.”

“That won’t be a problem,” said Ray, flexing the gloves of his suit. He had been looking forward to this.

“OK,” said Digg. “Now. _Go._ ”

The suit hummed softly as it generated a laser hot enough to cut concrete, and Ray aimed it at the ground beneath him. At the same time, he used his other hand to fasten an adhesive to the center of the circle he was cutting. The adhesive was engineered on the same principle as caterpillar silk, and it could hold many times its own weight. When the laser completed the circle and the chunk of concrete fell into the building below, the adhesive stretched and caught it just before it hit the floor. Silently, Ray dropped down after it.

He was in a cell. Despite knowing that his exit was right above him, he couldn’t help but feel claustrophobic - standing in the center of the small space, he could reach out and touch both walls, which were sweating beads of moisture. The air was damp and chill, and smelled musty. Ray was facing the bars that led to the balcony running outside of the cells, and he could hear the guards as they moved away from him, rattling bars and overturning bunks. He turned his back on the bars so that he was facing a narrow bunk, the only furniture in the room except for a small, seatless metal toilet. Sitting on the bed, looking paler and somehow smaller than the last time he had seen him, his mouth open and his eyes wide as he looked back at the man who had dropped from the sky, was Connor.


	11. Chapter 11

“So Ray has a ... suit,” said Oliver flatly.

“It looks like footie pajamas,” Roy offered, his tone apologetic.

“But it’s rigged with…” Felicity’s hands formed shapes in the air as she tried to explain, and finally gave up. “Tools.” 

“Like a swiss army knife?”

“Well… yeah,” said Roy, reluctantly. “If a swiss army knife looked like footie pajamas. And was equipped with a bunch of super advanced weaponry that even the military doesn’t have access to yet. All shrunk down using nuclear sciencey… stuff.”

Oliver, Roy and Tommy all looked expectantly at Felicity. She sighed. “Look, I could explain it, but honestly, you’re not going to understand it any better and you might fall asleep. Let’s just stick with ‘nuclear sciencey stuff.’”

“I’m just not crazy about the idea of any amateur with the money to do it setting himself up as a vigilante,” Oliver insisted, and then, as they all turned silent looks on him, closed his eyes in resignation. “I know, I hear it, you don’t have to say anything.”

“I think you’ll like him,” said Felicity, simply. “I really do. If you give him a chance.”

She knew that that was a big “if.” She also knew what it sounded like to Oliver when she stood up for Ray. _So be it._ Ray deserved better than to be dismissed as an amateur throwing money around, and he had come through for them in more than just the fight against Connor. She really did believe that he and Oliver would like each other, if they could get past their competitiveness. Ray could learn a lot from Oliver. And Oliver always needed more people in his life who could get him to lighten up.

She felt the shiver of guilt that ran through her every time she thought about Ray. He was waiting for her back home, and she had all but promised him that he had something to wait for. But as soon as she had seen Oliver - a walking ghost who, with one look, turned the carefully constructed walls around her heart to dust - it was no use pretending that she didn’t love him, or could ever love anyone else in the same way; that she wouldn’t follow him to the ends of the earth, or die for him in a heartbeat.

She wasn’t sure where she and Oliver stood right now. After the miracle of finding one another, they seemed instinctively and without words to understand that they had to be careful, to look neither forward nor back. Because nothing, really, had changed. Yes, she had been granted a miracle that every grieving survivor prays for - offers their life for - and none receives: the return of the lost. And now, as a result, she was trekking through the arctic tundra with two dead men in order to ally with a lost civilization to bring down an ancient order of assassins. She had to admit that, given what she had experienced in the last few days, anything was possible.

But, just when possibilities seemed limitless, she would remember that once they got back to Starling City, Oliver would still be Oliver - tender, distant and, more than anything else, _afraid_. If she let herself hope now, would his fear come between them again? If he stood before her now and told her again that yes, he loved her, and yes, it was the same as the love that she felt for him - a love that could burn down the world - and no, they couldn’t be together…. she didn’t know if she would be able to take it and keep breathing, let alone keep fighting. And if there was one thing she was sure of, it was that Starling City needed her to keep fighting - and that it was worth fighting for. With or without Oliver.

So if Oliver still didn’t want to be with her, she wouldn’t pine, and she wouldn’t wait for him. But she also wouldn’t pretend that she could ever feel the same kind of love for anyone else - and Ray deserved someone who could feel that way about him: someone to whom he made the rest of the world simultaneously more beautiful and utterly irrelevant; someone who would look at him and know that she had been living in black and white for her whole life, up until that moment.

She glanced sidelong at Oliver from beneath her lashes. They had automatically fallen into step, with Tommy and Roy keeping pace behind them. She saw now that he was glancing at her, as though he had felt her watching him. He offered her a slow, tentative smile, and she returned it before dropping her gaze back to her feet.

If she hadn't been so lost in thought, the sound might not have startled her as much as it did. As it was, she was ducking before her brain had processed it. Oliver's hand, hard on her arm, hauled her towards the nearest cover – a patch of brush to their right. At the sound of the arrow's whisper through the air, Roy and Tommy had broken in the other direction and were stacking their packs to use as makeshift cover.

Felicity and Oliver had drawn their bows but were holding fire, uncertain of where to direct it. The single arrow had come from dead ahead, so their attackers were standing between them and the plateau, but in the dim pre-dawn light, it was impossible to tell more than that. Their plan of using darkness for cover had backfired – the League had found them but were now invisible themselves.

Staying low, Tommy made a dash for the Oliver and Felicity as Roy covered him, loosing arrows blindly in the direction of their attackers. A flurry of arrows were returned, but so randomly that it was clear that they too were invisible in the darkness.

Tommy didn't make a sound, but a look passed between him and Oliver before he nodded, sharply, and then turned and slunk back towards Roy, who kept up a barrage of arrows so thick that they seemed to be coming from an army.

“We're splitting up.” Oliver's mouth was so close to Felicity's ear that he breathed, rather than whispered, the words. She knew that it would be foolish to say anything in return, thereby attracting attention from their attackers, but she wasn't sure that she agreed with the plan.

Still, there was no time to think. She shouldered her pack and nodded at Oliver, who barely gave her time to get to her feet before he took off. As the sun cracked the day open and spilled pale light across the gray snow, he fired an uninterrupted stream of arrows in the direction from which the first arrow had flown. Felicity followed, keeping pace at his heels and using her own bow to fill the few gaps in his fire. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Tommy and Roy launch a similar attack. While she and Oliver were running northeast, the others were headed northwest, but like Oliver and Felicity, were firing arrows due north.

_This is insane_. Even as her body responded unthinkingly to the threat, her brain was racing, calculating outcomes, and coming to the unavoidable conclusion that they had no hope of winning this battle - only of surviving it. They were firing blind, and no arrows were flying in response. They had no way of knowing whether their attackers had retreated or were simply biding their time. Felicity stopped firing and, as if reading her mind, Oliver did the same. In the sudden stillness, Felicity focused on keeping her footing in the snow, and tried not to think of silent figures, lurking ahead, who might, even now, be drawing on her dark silhouette, stark against the brightening morning.

 

********************

 

Ray looked thoughtfully at the tip of his finger, which was glowing orange in the darkness. Connor's eyes followed it as it wove back and forth, dragging a trail of light that made brief patterns before fading. 

“ _I told you,_ I never saw the guy. I came home one day and I found a burner phone. It rang, and the guy on the other end told me where to find the device.”

“And you didn't think there was anything strange about that.” Ray brought his hand close to Connor's face, so that the boy could feel the heat against his face. He cringed back. Ray had no intention of actually hurting him, but Connor seemed ready to believe the worst – presumably because he was used to associating with people who would actually _do_ the worst.

“Of course it was strange, man! But the guy said that all I had to do was have some fun with it, and that when I got arrested, I’d get sent to the island where they put Slade Wilson.” He grinned. “Slade fuckin’ Wilson, man! He’s a legend! Anyway, he sent a doctor to put this chip in my arm that he said he’d use to track us down, and then he'd come to bust me out - me and Slade - and then I could take the device and go wherever I wanted. There's a sick scene on this island off of Greece, I figured I could do damage there, then maybe Ibiza....” Even in the small, damp cell, the boy's eyes were glowing. Ray shook his head in disgust.

“You roofied a city. To meet a sociopath and fund a eurotrash world tour? That's....”

Connor's eyes flashed as Ray's voice seemed to bring him back to earth, and for a moment he seemed to forget about his smoking stubble. He narrowed his eyes. “Oh, you don't approve of my dreams, rich boy? You think I should have used my powers for good, not for evil? Or maybe you think I should have ditched the device and gone back home, sign on to be a line cook like my dad, work sixty hours a week just so I can get kicked out when the rent goes up by fifty bucks? Thanks, but I'll take Ibiza.” In the flickering light, the fury on his face was demonic, but when Ray pulled his own hand back, he saw that the sneer was a thin mask for an undercurrent of near-panic. Ray sighed and sat down next to the kid. 

“Look, I'm not going to hurt you, OK?” Connor started and shied away from him,and  suddenly, Ray realized that he had been taking the wrong interrogation approach. Connor was too easy to scare. Ray recognized that kind of fear – it meant that, somewhere along the line, this kid had gotten kicked while he was down once too often. Eventually, he'd learned to act scared because it was what was expected of him, and because being brave just caused more trouble. Ray knew what it felt like to cower and crouch because someone who was bigger than you wanted you to, and because it would make the pain end more quickly. He knew how it felt afterward, when part of you couldn't stop cowering.

And he also knew that underneath all of that, there was a little core of steel that never cowered, never shrank, and couldn't be touched by anyone, no matter how hard they kicked. That was how he knew that it would be a waste of time to try to scare the truth out of Connor – there was nothing he could do to the kid that would hold a candle to what someone much bigger and scarier had done to a much younger kid.

He closed his eyes for a moment. He suddenly felt incredibly tired. “I just want to know who put you up to it.”

Connor's jaw set. “I told you, I don't...”

“Know. I know. But maybe there's something that you're not telling me – some detail, about the voice or the phone. Or maybe you did meet him, just once, for the hand-off – I'm thinking that he wouldn't have just left the device sitting on your doorstep.”

Connor was silent. The set of his face didn't soften, but something about the way his eyes narrowed let Ray know he was on the right track.

“Only, maybe you don't want to tell me. Because I'm the guy who put you here, and he's the guy who promised to get you out, right?”

Connor looked at Ray, and in his eyes was the same naked hatred that he had directed at Roy when they had taken him down. But in this place, it wasn't intimidating, or chilling. It was just pathetic. Connor's hopes and fears were written, openly, on his face. He was waiting for rescue – and it was beginning to dawn on him that it might not be coming.

“You're not stupid,” said Ray, softly. “You did a lot of stupid stuff because you were desperate. But you're smart enough to know that he's not coming for you. Right?”

Connor's clung to his silence, his last vestige of control.

“But I'm here. I'm not saying I'll get you out. You deserve to be here, for a long time. But I can promise that I won't forget about you. I won't leave you in here to rot, and he will. I'll see about getting you some help.”

Connor started to open his mouth indignantly, but Ray didn't give him a chance. “Shut up. Don't be stupid. Don't be so hellbent on being the bad guy that you pass up the only chance you're going to get to be something better.” Ray swallowed, and wondered if he would regret what he was about to say. Connor wasn't exactly trustworthy, but somehow, this small, dark space felt private – like a confessional. “I know what happened to you. Not everything, but enough. And I know something about … what that's like. I had to make my choices about what to become, too.”

It was a long time before Connor spoke. “He had glasses. He was tall, like you, but really thin. He wouldn't look at me, so I don't know what he looked like. But his glasses had – like one of those shoestring things to hold them on? And I remember thinking it was weird – they had, like, little mushrooms on them.”

Ray felt like someone had punched him in the stomach. “Not mushrooms.”

“What?” Connor, startled, for once dropped his sneer, and it made him look even younger than he was. “Yuh-huh. Mushrooms.” 

“No. Not mushrooms.” _His legs were on fire, and he was dragging them behind him like empty sacks. She was still breathing. He could see her chest, going up and down, and she was still breathing. He would get there in time, and -_

_The fist landed, again, with a wet sounded. There was a crack, and the left half of her head disappeared. Just like that – it was gone. The man on top of her didn't stop. She was still breathing, and he wouldn't stop. It wasn't Anna – Anna didn't have so much red in her hair. Anna's voice was musical. No sound that came from Anna' s throat had that wet rattle to it._  

_It seemed that, with every drag, Ray got farther from her. She was still breathing – and then she wasn't. The man on top of her stood up and turned towards him. Ray stopped. Thank God - the man hadn't forgotten him. He would kill him too, and then he would be with Anna again. It would hurt, but only for a little while. And nothing could hurt more than this, lying here in the street, staring at the thing that used to be Anna._

_The man raised his foot to stomp down. Ray knew that it would end him, and he tried to stay still for it – he did. But at the last minute, his reflexes took over, and he rolled to the side so that the foot hit his shoulder instead of his neck. As the pain began to take him, he looked up one last time, trying to memorize the face of the man who had done this – the man he would hunt down, no matter what._

_The face was so far away. The man was already moving on, turning away, and Ray was desperate. With one frantic effort, he raised himself on his elbows to narrow the gap, but the face was gone. All he could see was the back of a head, slick with sweat and blood, and bisected absurdly by a bright blue strap._

_Not just blue. It was decorated. Ray was fading, but he held desperately to the last image. Bright blue, yes, with spots of white – mushrooms._

_No. Not mushrooms. Mushroom_ clouds. _That was it. Ray held the image – man's greatest fear, the worst evil ever committed – as he sank into darkness and prayed that he would never emerge again, into a world without Anna._  


	12. Chapter 12

Oliver kept his bow close to his side as he ran. He didn't need to look over his shoulder to make sure that Felicity was okay – he could feel her right behind him, the movement of the air around her, the warmth coming off of her body. Cautiously, he sped up, and she kept pace with him, until he was running flat out. He could hear her breathing, deep and even, and wondered exactly how hard she had been training.

The sun was up now, shining on the warmest morning that Oliver had seen since he had been this far north. They couldn't keep up this pace indefinitely, and the snow was turning into slush, making it even harder to run. It made sense to find cover and stop, hydrate and get their bearings. It _did_ make sense. It had nothing to do with whether or not Felicity was about to pass him.

He saw a stand of trees ahead of them and steered for it, reaching back to touch Felicity's arm and signal his intention. She nodded and followed suit. He hadn't heard the soft tear of of arrow through the air since they had shouldered their own bows, but he didn't pause to look around once they made it to the trees – it was the only cover for miles around, and it was an obvious hiding place. He anticipated the attack, ducking as the man leap out from behind the first tree and returning his blow with a far more devastating one of his own. The man was wearing apprentice's robes – it explained the oddly disorganized attack in the dark, as well as this clumsy trap.

He wasn't sure how many of them there might be, and he had lost track of Felicity in the stand of trees. He was beginning to look for her, frantic, when an arrow whispered past his ear and, with a soft thump, found its target behind him. He turned to see another apprentice, arm still raised, knife in hand, with a look of mild surprise on his face at the arrow that was sticking out from between his eyes.

“Oh,” said Felicity behind him, softly. He turned and looked up, towards the sound of her voice. She was perched in the low branches of one of the trees – that had been why he couldn't find her. She was still holding the bow, and she was looking past him, to where the second attacker was still in the middle of his slow fall, collapsing first to his knees, and then face-down into the snow. Oliver stepped aside so that he was blocking her view.

“Don't look,” he said urgently. “Don't look at him.” The arrow had silently entered the snow, allowing the body to fall flat so that there was no sign of the wound, except for the growing red stain. He didn't know what had happened in Starling City when he was gone, but he could tell from the look on Felicity's face that it had not required her to kill anyone. He felt a stabbing pain in his chest. He would have given anything – _anything –_ to spare her this.

“He's dead,” she said. It wasn't a question.

“Yes,” said Oliver, not moving aside. “You don't need to look.” He approached her slowly, and reached up his arms towards her. She slid forward so that he could grasp her around the waist and lift her down, slowly, until she was standing in front of him. Again, he was aware of her warmth, and he fought the impulse to draw her close to him and warm himself by her; to press her face into his neck and protect her from ever seeing anything as ugly as what lay behind him now.

“Yes,” she said. “I do.” She walked around him and looked down at the body. It, too, was still warm, and she reached out for it. He wanted to say, “don't,” but stopped himself. He didn't have the right to protect her from this.

“I’m sorry,” he offered, and his voice sounded too loud in the stillness. “I didn’t want you to ever have to make that choice.”

Her hand stopped a few inches away from the man – boy, Oliver could see now. The stubble on his face was soft and sparse. She seemed to be about to stroke the back of his head, as if to comfort a child waking up from a nightmare. Instead, she stood up and dusted her hands on her pants. “It's okay,” she said, matter-of-factly. Her face had a far-away, peaceful look. “He had you and he was going to hurt you. There was no choice to make.”

Then she turned away and threw up.

 

********************

 

Roy was pacing himself. He didn't know how far they would have to go or for how long- and he had no idea what kind of shape Tommy was in. Oliver had said that they should split up, so they were splitting up – and Tommy was clearly important to Oliver, so it was up to Roy to look out for him.

Or at least, that was the plan. When a man emerged from behind a snow bank next to them, Roy had hardly reached for his bow before Tommy took him out with a roundhouse kick. “Keep going,” he hissed breathlessly, but another man was emerging from the same spot, and Roy paused long enough to hit him hard enough to knock him out. Roy and Tommy paused, their breath steaming in the air as they stood panting. 

“Do you think that's all of them?” Roy asked, but Tommy was already shaking his head.

“It doesn't make any sense. See the robes? No colors, no flourishes – it means that they're apprentice assassins. If the League really thought that they had a chance of running into us out here, they would never have sent amateurs like these. They did it before, when Oliver and I were first on the run, but that's because they didn't expect to find him with me. The only reason I can think for them to do it now would be if they genuinely had no idea where we are and were just casting a wide net.”

“But that doesn't make sense – they must know we're in this area, since we took out those other scouts. Either the survivor made it back and told them, or they would have figured out why neither one made it back. So why send assassins now?” Roy cast a hunted look at the landscape around them. In the bright sunshine, they could see for miles around them. There wasn't a shadow in sight. 

Tommy shrugged. “A decoy? A distraction?”

Roy gestured towards the empty landscape surrounding them. “From what?” 

Tommy shivered. “I don't know, but I think we'd better keep moving and meet up with Oliver and Felicity as soon as we can. The League knows where we are – that means trouble.”

“Why split up in the first place?” As Tommy started moving again, Roy fell into pace at his side. The snow was melting and the ground was growing marshy. With each step, the land underfoot tugged at him, the way the current had when he and Felicity were crossing the ice. It seemed like the landscape had pitted itself against them.

“Together we made an easy target. When we scatter, we force them to make a judgment call, and that creates the possibility that they'll make a bad one. Plus it forces them to split their resources.”

“And it forces us to split ours.”

Tommy grinned. “Yeah, that's the flip side. But we split up by choice. They split up because we forced them to. We've gotta hope that counts for something.” He noticed the crease in Roy's forehead. “Hey, don't worry. They'll be fine. Oliver knows what he's doing.” He rubbed his arm where Felicity's arrow had pierced. “So does Felicity, apparently.”

The walked in silence for a few minutes. As always happened when there was nothing to do but walk, Roy's thoughts began to drift – and took the direction that they usually took. Thinking of Thea and how she would react to having another brother in her life, Roy said, “Are you coming home?” 

“What?” Tommy looked startled, but Roy didn't know if it was at the break in silence or the question itself. 

“When this is all over. Are you coming back to Starling City?”

“Of course. Why would you even ask?” Tommy looked almost angry, and Roy wondered if he'd accidentally stumbled on a sensitive subject. 

“I don't know. I just thought... it's been two years. I thought maybe you have a life here, you know? And... I kind of figured that if you really wanted to get home, you could have before now.” Roy regretted the last sentence before it was even out of his mouth. “I don't mean that in a bad way. Just that maybe you have reasons for staying here.” Oh, God. He was making it worse.

Tommy stalked on in silence for a few minutes. “You think I don't care about people back home? You think I was selfish to stay here?”

“No!” Roy cleared his throat. “I didn't mean that.”

“I thought about it. I thought about it a _lot._ I just... At first it seemed impossible, you know? Miles of wilderness just to get to an outpost. That was back when I was still figuring out... this whole thing.” He shrugged his right shoulder. “And then, as I got better – I don't know. It still seemed impossible, but in a different way. Like, how was I supposed to explain it? To Laurel, to Oliver – I didn't know that they knew about the League. I kept picturing coming back home, showing up at her doorstep, and saying, 'hey, remember me? Turns out I'm not dead, after all. I was rescued by my father – yeah, the other guy who's supposed to be dead – and nursed back to health by an ancient league of assassins who tried to turn me into one of them. Then I found refuge with a supposedly extinct civilization, and as soon as I was totally healed, I walked through hundreds of miles of wilderness to make it home. Surprise!”

Tommy's voice was no longer angry – or at least, his anger was no longer directed at Roy. Instead, it was softly mocking of himself, with a bitter edge. Roy let the silence breathe for a moment, uncertain if he would be pushing his luck by continuing the conversation. Finally, he spoke up.

“Maybe you wouldn't have to explain. At least not right away.”

“What do you mean?” Tommy looked honestly puzzled.

“Well, it seems to me that you're making a lot of assumptions.” It hadn't escaped Roy's notice that Tommy had referred to showing up on “her” doorstep – it seemed that Oliver wouldn't have been his first visit on his return home. “You show up on her doorstep, and you're assuming that the first thing she's going to do – the _very_ first thing – is say 'what are you doing here?”

“Yeah? So?”

Roy shrugged. “So, if the love of her life, who she thought was dead, shows up out of the blue. I'm thinking that she's not going to be much in the mood for talking. Crying, maybe. Falling into your arms, maybe.” He looked at Tommy's stiff face. “Sorry. Arm.”

“You're make some assumptions yourself.” Tommy's tone was so cold that Roy honestly thought he might haul off and punch him. “'Love of her life,' for one.”

Roy nodded. “You're right, that was an assumption. I guess I just figure that when a woman doesn't date anyone else for two years, there's a reason for it. Maybe I'm wrong.”

Tommy stalked in silence for a few steps, then snapped, “Sorry, did I ask for relationship advice?”

“Nope.” Roy kept his own tone light.

“And you decided to give it because…”

Roy thought for a moment, and decided to be honest. He nodded ahead of them, where the plateau loomed. “Because that thing’s a good 10 miles away still, and walking for another 3 hours through this stupid ice field is going to drive me insane with boredom, and talking to you about Laurel is something to do.” He decided that, as long as he was being honest, he might as well go all the way. “And because I think you have a real shot with her, and she deserves to be happy.”

To his surprise, the corners of Tommy’s mouths lifted in a smile. “Oliver and I would just walk in silence. For hours. He would kind of look up at the sky, and then look back at me, and I would think, hey, maybe he’s gonna say something. Then he’d just keep walking. Sometimes I would pick a fight with him just to break the silence.” 

“I’ve done that before.” Roy jogged a few steps to catch up with Tommy, who had picked up his pace. “When we’re staking someone out, he’s just totally still and quiet. And my muscles are cramping, I’m cold, I have to pee, whatever. So finally I’ll say something about how guns would be more efficient than arrows, or how we could just set up cameras and watch for the bad guy in the comfort of the basement. Just to stop him from looking so damn zen all the time.”

“You know, he’s always had that expression? Even before the island. We’d go to a frat party and I’d be running game, flashing money, dropping names - working so damn hard just to get a girl to look at me twice. And there he’d be, chilling in some corner with that look on his face, like he was so above it all, and the girls would just be _flocking_ to him.” The corners of his mouth turned up in what could have been a smile or a grimace. “I was always the best friend. He’d never admit it, but that’s how everyone saw me - as Oliver Queen’s best friend. Laurel, even my own dad. Shit, _I_ started to see myself that way.” His face grew serious. “And then he got on that yacht, and I got the news. And a part of me thought, ‘I guess I’m not Oliver Queen’s best friend anymore.” He shook his head. “I hated myself for it, because I would have given anything to get him back. But I also felt like it was my chance to be _the guy,_ you know? The guy who doesn’t have to work so hard just to get seen. And for a while… I think maybe I was. I mean, Laurel and I started hooking up, and my dad started paying attention to me, angling to get me to work for him. I thought, _this is it, this is what it feels like to be the guy.”_ Tommy’s gaze was still straight ahead, but his voice had softened and taken on a distant tone, almost dreamy.“And it was all so… empty. I would have given it all up, in a second, just to get one more day with Oliver. Everything with him was more vivid. More _real. I_ was more real. When he came home, it felt like the last five years had been a bad dream, and now it was time to get back to real life.” He blinked in the bright sunlight, as if he really had just woken up from a dream and was surprised to find that he wasn’t alone. The look he gave Roy was embarrassed, and his tone when he spoke was stiff. “Don’t tell him that, though. It’ll go to his head.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” said Roy, keeping his own casual. He remembered how unmoored he had felt when Oliver had disappeared. He knew what it was like to be the sidekick, to know that you would never be the hero of the story - and to be okay with it because it was enough just to be _in_ the story. Because being a sidekick to Oliver was better than being a hero to anyone else.

It only took two hours to get to the rendezvous point - a spot at the base of the Kawani plateau that Oliver and Tommy had selected as their return route. It was less sheer than their journey down had been, so it was more likely to be patrolled by the League, but they had no choice – they had barely survived the climb down the sheer face and knew that trying to make their way back up by the same route would have been impossible. Before Felicity and Roy had joined them, they had planned to climb fast and hope for the best, covering one another in the case of an attack. Now that they had twice as many people, they were more likely to be seen – but they also had more eyes to keep watch and more hands to provide cover fire, if necessary.

Tommy explained this to Roy as they waited at the base of the cliff for Felicity and Oliver, who hadn't yet arrived. Both men were careful to avoid speculating about why, but their relief was palpable when they spotted the two figures in the distance. As they grew closer, Roy noticed that Felicity seemed pale and shaken, but she gave him a small smile when she saw the concern on his face. As soon as they were close enough, she picked up her pace to a run, and threw her arms around his shoulders.

“I'm glad you're OK,” she said, into his neck. Embarrassed, he patted her back stiffly, but he knew how she felt. After depending solely on one another for weeks on end, it had felt strange and disorienting to lose sight of her.

“Are _you_ OK?” he asked, pulling back and examining her face. Again, she gave him that small, wobbly smile.

“Yeah. We got ambushed by a couple of League guys. Just trainees – they were young.” She looked down for a moment and a shadow crossed her face, but when she looked back up at him her eyes were clear. “But we're both OK.”

Oliver, who hadn't broken into a run when Felicity had, now approached and nodded at Tommy. “You want to hug it out?”

“You guys stop for a nap or something?” Tommy's tone was dry, but he was grinning widely.

Oliver shrugged and glanced at Felicity, who met his gaze, unflinching. “It took us a little while to recover from the attack.”

Clearly, something had happened between the two of them. Roy wondered if they had taken advantage of the private time. He couldn't really blame them. If Thea were here, he wouldn't want to leave anything unsaid. Or undone. 

He craned his head back to contemplate the climb ahead of them.

“I think we should go in pairs. That way, if one person falls...” Oliver's voice trailed off but Roy immediately had an image of all four of them, tied together, tumbling one after the other like a grotesque game of dominoes. Oliver continued, glancing at where the sun was already dipping below the horizon, “We should get going quickly, if you guys aren't too tired. Dusk is good for us – enough light to see by, but enough shadow to hide us.”

“I'll go with Roy, you go with Tommy.” Felicity's tone brooked no objections. Roy looked at Tommy, who gave an expressive shrug, indicating that he was willing to let Oliver and Felicity make the calls.

Roy wished that Felicity hadn’t spoken so quickly. Oliver’s habitual glare seemed to have sharpened and turned in his direction as she went on. “It just makes sense,” she insisted. She had already retrieved her climbing rope from her pack.“Roy and I have climbed together before, and so have you and Tommy. You and Roy have too, but Tommy and I hardly know each other- it would be stupid to pair us for the first time when the stakes are so high. And I think you and I are the strongest climbers, so one of us should be in each pair.”

Roy wondered if he should protest the pairings, or if that would make things worse. Besides, Felicity made a good point. She had taken naturally to the less combative aspects of training like climbing and running. She was strong and light, and naturally took the lead when they climbed together. Roy was stronger and more acrobatic, but Felicity was better at strategizing and picking a route out of a maze of potential holds. He shrugged, avoiding Oliver’s eyes. “What can I say? She's wiry.”

Without waiting for a response, she looped one end of rope around her waist and handed the other end to Roy. She backed up and studied the cliff's base for a moment. Then, she took off. Within a few minutes she was 20 feet above the ground, drawing the line behind her taut. “That's my signal,” said Roy, and started up behind her.

Oliver and Tommy looked up after her in silence, the tightening of Oliver’s jaw the only indication of how he felt. Tommy looked over at him and slapped his shoulder.

“I think she might be too much woman for you, man.”

“Shut up or I’ll drop you.” Oliver tied himself and Tommy together, yanking on the knots with more force than was strictly necessary. 

“No 'four tugs' system this time?” Tommy raised his eyebrows.

“Nope.” Oliver backed up and rubbed his hands together, searching for his route. “This time, we're all making it to the top.” 


	13. Chapter 13

Oliver traced a route that was just west of the one that Felicity had chosen. It was slightly more difficult, but he wanted to keep pace with her in case something happened. If he followed, he might not know anything had gone wrong until it was too late.

She and Roy really did work well together. Oliver tried to feel good about that. The rope ran between them like a language, and after Felicity's first call down, he didn't hear them speak again. Roy seemed to feel in the rope's tension that Felicity had anchored and was ready for him to come up – and Felicity seemed to guide him without words, only occasionally needing a gesture to indicate a hold. Oliver knew that he and Tommy climbed the same way, but that level of wordless communication had arisen from years of friendship and emotional intimacy. Oliver wondered what kind of intimacy had Felicity and Roy had shared.

He shook his head, abruptly, and tried to focus on the climb. That wasn't fair. He had no idea what Felicity and Roy had been through together these past few months – he knew he'd only gotten the Cliff's Notes version. He wasn't going to judge them for growing as close as they had. And he wasn't going to let anyone know about the knife that had twisted in his gut when Felicity had immediately volunteered to be tied to Roy. It made sense. He _knew_ that it made sense. But... it had been so fast, as if she hadn't even considered being tethered to him instead. Didn't she trust him as much as she trusted Roy to catch her if she fell?

He growled under his breath in frustration. “What's taking so long?” he hissed to Tommy. He had anchored himself a few minutes ago and had given Tommy the signal, and he felt as if he'd been waiting forever for the other man to catch up. Tommy's voice floated up out of the darkness. Even at a whisper, it had a decidedly long-suffering tone to it.

“Well, first of all, you picked the harder route, which, thanks for that. Second of all, I am minus one arm. So pardon me if I'm not _flying_ up the cliff as fast as you and your girlfriend.”

“They're pulling ahead.” Oliver leaned as far out as he dared to see the bottom of Ray's boots as he hauled himself up another ledge.

“Oh, no, they're _winning?_ ” Tommy's voice was interrupted by grunts and gasps as he worked his way up the direct, but challenging, route that Oliver had chosen. “We're not all trying to prove something to our girlfriend, you know. Some of us are just trying to make it up this stupid cliff alive.”

Oliver gritted his teeth. Above him and to the right, a rock shifted and skittered its way down the cliff face, and he heard a soft grunt and a whispered, “ _shit.”_

“Are you OK?” He didn't bother to whisper, or to wait for a response. Before Tommy had reached him, he slipped out of his own rope, secured it to an outcropping so that Tommy would be safe, and started free climbing towards the sound. He was halfway there before Felicity responded, her voice shaking.

“We're fine – stay where you are. I slipped, but we're fine. Roy caught me." 

Oliver had stopped when she told him to, but now he was trembling with the effort of staying where he was. She was so close – less than five feet away now. He could hear her breath as she tried to steady herself to go on. He thought that he could feel her shaking. _Roy caught me._ Her breath was slowing now, but his own was still short, and the sound of his heart pounding filled his ears. He didn't think he could stand this. Then she spoke again, her voice soft in the darkness – so soft that neither Roy, above them, or Tommy below them would be able to hear.

“We're so close, Oliver. We're so close to the top. Go back to Tommy. We'll see you up there. I _promise._ OK? I promise.” Her voice was calm and urgent, and for a moment, he felt like he was back on the rooftops of Starling City with her voice in his ear, guiding him. Without thinking, he responded how he always did, his body in motion, returning to Tommy, before he was aware of making the decision. He would always follow where she guided him – because, in the end, she always guided him home.

When he got back to his own perch, Tommy was there, waiting for him. “Looking for this?” Tommy held out Oliver's end of the rope and refrained from comment as Oliver re-tied it around his waist. But his eyes, as he watched his old friend, were thoughtful.

The rest of the climb passed quickly and uneventfully. Felicity had been right – they were close to the top. When Oliver hauled himself over the edge, Felicity was lying flat on her back in the snow, panting clouds of breath towards the stars. Roy was sitting with his knees drawn up to his chest, visibly exhausted but keeping watch while she rested. Oliver noticed again, and hated himself for noticing, how naturally and wordlessly they each took on what was clearly an accustomed role. 

Tommy was the last to summit, and when he did, he glared silently at Oliver for a moment while he caught his breath. “That... sucked. Next time… I choose the route.” 

“Fair enough.” Oliver tossed Tommy a water bladder and glanced up at the progress of the moon. “It's still pretty early. I think we should be able to make it back to the mine by dawn.” He rose and offered his hand to Felicity. “Ready?” 

She took it and nodded, too winded to reply, but Tommy sat up and spoke first.

“Hold on. We need to talk.” He looked back and forth from Felicity and Oliver. “Look, this is kind of awkward. But... I learned something on that climb.” 

Oliver stiffened. He had known that he wouldn't get off so easily for untying from Tommy. “I had to act fast. I tied you off first – nothing bad could have happened.”

“No, that's true. I mean, unless you count you plummeting to your death something bad.”

Oliver shook his head impatiently. “That was never going to happen.”

“No, that was _probably_ not going to happen. But it could have. You took a stupid risk because you thought Felicity might be in trouble.” Tommy looked embarrassed. “I'm sorry, but we have to talk about it, because it affects all of us. I'm not saying this because I'm mad – I probably would have done the same thing if it were – my point is, I don't blame you. But now we know – when it comes to Felicity, you don't always think straight.” 

In all of his imagined conversations with Felicity – all of the times that he'd thought of telling her how he felt, asking her to give him another chance, or even just to give him time – never in a million years had he imagined that Roy and Tommy would be there, watching them like hawks. He closed his eyes in despair. “Do we have to talk about this right now?”

“Oliver, listen to me. I'm saying this for a reason – I need you to think straight. You get it? We're about to go into battle against Ra's al Ghul, and you've just told me that our closest ally isn't above using our loved ones against us. Can you understand why I'm concerned, here?” Tommy spread his hands out, beseechingly. Roy looked at Felicity, who looked at the ground.

“Look, if it's clear to _me_ how much of a weakness she is for you...”

“Felicity is _not_ a weakness,” Oliver ground out between his teeth.

Tommy spoke quietly. “You know what I mean, man. You don't think when it comes to her. I get it. But so will Katherine.” Oliver looked up, sharply, and Tommy continued. “Katherine has already threatened to use her against you... and based on tonight, I'm worried that she's going to have a really easy time doing that.”

“Katherine doesn't know it's Felicity.” He forced the words out.

“What?”

Oliver cleared his throat. “Katherine doesn't know that it's Felicity. Who I… I mean... I never used her name. I was careful.” He had never felt so clumsy, so inept. Oliver Queen, playboy, had never had a problem letting a woman know exactly how interested he was in her. Oliver Queen was _smooth_. So why did he suddenly wish that he could disappear into the ground, jump back over the cliff’s edge, go anywhere to get away from the feeling of Felicity’s eyes on him? Oh, God, he was _blushing._ He closed his eyes, willing the fire in his cheeks to go away. _Masked vigilantes don’t blush._

Tommy looked doubtful. “I... kind of think she's going to figure it out.”

For the first time, Oliver looked at Felicity. He had imagined the feel of her eyes; she was avoiding his gaze. Somehow, that was worse. He opened his mouth to speak, felt it go dry, and closed it again. He watched her trail patterns in the dirt, watched the lines come together in a recognizable shape - a box, with a smaller box inside of it and a rectangle full of tiny boxes beneath that.

A computer. Out here in the wilderness, she was reaching for comfort, the only thing that made her feel at home. He wanted to laugh, to cry, to hold her until she felt safe enough that she didn’t need to draw talismans in the mud. Suddenly, he wasn’t embarrassed anymore. They were doing this to keep her safe, to get her home again; that was all that mattered. “So we fake it.” 

Roy cleared his throat. “Um, there might be a problem with that…”

“What?”

“What do you think?” Tommy rolled his eyes. “Don't make me say it.

“The way that you look at each other,” Roy muttered, avoiding Oliver's eyes.

“I can fake it,” Oliver said again, more insistently. At Tommy's skeptical look, he went on, “I _can.”_ He lowered his voice and spoke directly to Felicity, wishing that it was just the two of them so he could say what he really meant. “If it's to protect you, I can pretend not to care about you.”

“Yeah, but can _you_?” It was Roy’s turn to look skeptical, but he was looking at Felicity. She looked up from her makeshift workstation, reluctantly. “You’re not exactly known for your poker face.”

“What does it matter? I had a crush on Oliver for years before he… um… I mean…” Felicity blushed, and Oliver's pulse began to beat faster. “My point is, my having feelings for him doesn’t mean that he has feelings for me.”

“Yeah, but from what you said, Katherine’s not stupid. A random girl who’s in love with Oliver shows up, and she doesn’t make the connection?” Roy shook his head. Felicity cleared her throat and glared at him.

“No, he’s right,” said Tommy thoughtfully, looking back and forth between Felicity and Roy. “But if two friends of Oliver’s who are in love with _each other_ show up, you might get away with it. Roy, how good of an actor are you?”

Roy looked up, alarmed. “Oh yeah, _that's_ a list I want my name on. Right after Ray Turner and Barry Allen.” At Tommy's blank look, he explained, “Men that Oliver wouldn't mind shooting an arrow into.”

“I don't – I mean, I like Barry, _now_...” Oliver objected, then trailed off as he realized that his half-hearted protest was worse than none.

“It's a good idea.” Felicity finally spoke up with the same confidence that she had shown at the base of the cliff, and once again, Oliver felt the knife twist. He had liked it better when there was a sword stuck in him. It _was_ a good idea – that was the worst part of it. He had no reason to be upset. 

He patted Roy on the back - a little harder than necessary. “I’ll do my best to refrain from shooting you,” he said, trying to sound like he was joking.

Roy looked glum. “Great,” he muttered. “That makes me feel _so_ much better.” Warily, he took Oliver's hand and got to his feet, and winced at the the bone-crushing grip.

 

********************

 

Digg was sitting in Felicity's chair, scrolling through blueprints of the prison, when Roy returned to the basement. “Hey, I lost you when you went into his cell,” he said without turning around. “The walls are too thick. I've identified about eight access points that would be better for reception. Felicity would have found them the first time around. I guess I'm a poor...” he trailed off as he spun around and saw Ray's face. “What the hell is the matter with you, man?”

Instead of responding, Ray went to the workstation that he had set up for himself. He had done it piece by piece, unobtrusively, using a laptop and perching himself on a collapsible stool, as though he had expected to be asked to leave at any moment. Now, he straddled the stool and powered up the screen, ignoring Digg. Or, perhaps, not hearing him at all. His eyes were black pinpricks, his skin pale except for two bright spots high on each cheek. Digg wondered if he was sick – he looked feverish.

“Ray. What's going on, man? Do you feel OK?” Digg approached slowly. His deployments had taught him that even a man who was usually the first to lend a hand or crack a joke could, under the right set of circumstances, fade into himself, losing contact with anything outside of the whispers in his own head. He had found that it was dangerous in those cases to assume that the man looking back at you would still be your friend.

He didn't touch Ray. Instead, he slowly placed his own gun on the desk next to him, where it made an audible click. Ray gave it a brief glance, but his expression didn't change.

“So what are you looking for?” Digg kept his voice neutral and businesslike, giving the impression that he was joining Ray in his focus instead of trying to shake him out of it.

It worked. Ray responded automatically. “I have a description. I've never really thought about that before – I always thought about them together, as a group. An army. But he was one man, and I saw his face. If I can just remember – I _saw his face._ ” He looked at Digg, and now there was urgency in his voice. “It's just like any other crime, right? He's a murderer, and I'm a witness. I just need to _remember...”_ Ray dug the heels of his hands into his eyes, as though he could force the image he was after to emerge there. 

“You were pretty out of it, man.” Digg thought that he knew what they were talking about, but he had no idea why now. He wondered if Ray's optimism and good nature had been a veneer, if beneath them he had been close to cracking this whole time - and what had happened to trigger it now. “Why don’t you take a break? Maybe if you get some sleep…” 

Ray looked at him and, out of the blue, began to laugh. “You think I'm crazy.”

“Naw, man. I don't think that.” Digg still kept his voice neutral, but he was worried about the laughter.

Roy sobered, but Digg thought that he could see the shadow of the other man’s trademark grin in the laughter’s aftermath. “Then why are you using your talking-to-crazy-people voice?”

Digg glared at him, started to speak, stopped himself. He took a moment and decided that, whatever was going on with Ray, it _was_ Ray that he was talking to again. The color was back in his face, and the blank look in his eyes was gone. “Well, if you don't want me to use my crazy-people voice, don't come in here looking like a crazy person. You're freaking me out. What's going on? Why are you talking about … we're talking about your fiancee, right? Anna's killer?”

The corners of Ray’s mouth turned down and he turned back to the computer. “I never thought clearly about it before. I thought about them as monsters – but they were men, Digg. It was a man who killed Anna, and I saw it. When Connor talked about the glasses strap, I _remembered._ And then I thought, how many men wear a strap like that?”

Digg sighed. “Should I ask for an explanation or should I just let you babble and hope you fill in the gaps at some point?”

“Connor said that the man who set him up wore a strap that went across the back of his head – you know, one of those cords that holds your glasses on.”

Digg grimaced. “People wear those? I've seen them in stores, but...”

“People wear them when they care more about keeping track of their glasses than they do about how they look.” Ray looked thoughtful. “That's a good point, actually. That tells us something about him – either he's blind without his glasses, or he doesn't care about his appearance.”

“Or he's a nerd who doesn't know any better,” Digg pointed out.

Ray started to object, then paused and seemed to change his mind. “Or he's a nerd,” he agreed. “Anyway, Connor said that the strap was decorated with mushrooms.”

“So he's a druggie?” Digg frowned. “That doesn't feel right.”

“That's because it's not right. They weren't mushrooms on the strap – they just looked like mushrooms from a distance. But I saw them close up, when he was standing over me on the street. After ...” Roy swallowed, hard. “After he'd killed Anna.” 

“Hold up. How can you possible know that it's the same man?” 

“Because I remember the design on the strap, too. Not mushrooms. Mushroom _clouds._ How many glasses retainers - that’s what they’re called, evidently - are decorated with mushroom clouds?” Ray looked at his screen where a search of the stock of a major accessories retailer had come up empty. “Not many, evidently. In fact, I'm willing to bet that when I've searched a few more places, we're going to find out that there aren't any. It's tacky. Who uses nuclear annihilation as an accessory?” 

“Are you sure?” Digg looked Ray in the eyes. “About it being the same guy, I mean. Because if we go after this guy thinking that he's the one who killed Anna, and it turns out that we're wrong... I'm just saying, don't want to unleash you and your suit on the wrong guy.”

Ray nodded, grimly. “I'll check. We won't go after this guy without proof. If the glasses retainer was a custom design – which I think it must have been – will that be enough proof for you?” 

Digg thought for a long moment. “That would merit us asking him some very tough questions. Just don't go off on your own on this one, OK?” 

Even as he said it, Ray was turning back to the computer. He gave him an absent-minded affirmative. Digg didn't know if Oliver's rules applied now that Oliver was gone, or how they were going to factor in the effect of the mirakuru in considering what justice would mean in this case. All he knew was that he was going to have to watch Ray very carefully. Digg knew how destructive vengeance could be, and he wasn't going to let it destroy Ray.

He started to turn away, but Ray's voice stopped him. The other man kept his back turned towards Digg, and when he spoke, his voice was studiously casual.

“Have you heard from them?”

Digg didn't pretend not to know what Ray meant. He swallowed his own concern and made his voice as casual as Ray’s.

“No,” he said. “I haven’t.”

********************

 

As they moved away from the cliff's edge towards the center of the plateau, the landscape changed. It became more rugged, with rough outcroppings hinting at the complex maze of rock below, and stands of evergreen that had been warped and weathered by harsh winds. Felicity remembered the thick, tall pines of the southern forest with longing. It had made her feel claustrophobic, but it had also been something to tether her. What at the time had seemed like the farthest reaches of the wilderness now seemed downright civilized compared to the high country that they were traveling. It had the appearance of having been scraped clean – even the buildings of the League, visible in the distance, seemed to huddle close to the earth. Nothing that reached for the sky could survive here.

She walked next to Roy. Both Oliver and Tommy had grown quiet and tense as they traveled away from the cliff. She didn't know Tommy well enough to intrude on his silence, and while she ordinarily would have teased and tugged at Oliver's quiet until he gave in – either by laughing at her or yelling at her – something was stopping her now. 

She wasn't sure that she believed Tommy when he said that Oliver's feelings for her put him, or her, at risk – she wasn't even sure what those feelings were. But it made sense to her that, if there was any risk, the safest course would be camouflage. It didn't even seem like a big deal – a few chaste pecks and a little bit of hand-holding wasn't going to hurt anyone. But since the cliff, she had been unable to escape the feeling that Oliver was angry with her – and the impulse to apologize, though she would be damned if she knew what for.

Up ahead, there was a clearing, and in the center a massive heap of ash and debris was the only sign that a building had ever stood there. Tommy stopped in his tracks and stared.

“My God,” he muttered.

“Katherine's distraction. They must have lit it up the night that we left – that explains why there were no League scouts in the area.” Oliver spoke over his shoulder to Roy and Felicity, as if as an afterthought. “This was the cabin where the League was keeping Tommy. It's where he first brought me.”

Felicity shivered. She didn't like to think about that chapter of the story – Tommy dragging a bleeding, unconscious Oliver through the snow, uncertain whether he would be able to save him. But now she couldn't help but stare at the ruins of the cabin, picturing the scene – Tommy, shouldering open the door and clinging to Oliver with one hand – Oliver, staining the snow around him with red, his chest barely rising and falling... 

She didn't realize the effect that the image had on her until she felt Roy’s hand, light and warm on the small of her back, and heard her own ragged, uneven breaths. She forced her mind away from the nightmare and, steadying herself, gave Roy a reassuring smile. Oliver, alerted as well by the change in her breathing, had turned in time to see Roy reach out for her. He gave them a dark look and turned away.

Then Felicity spotted it, poking out from a pile of rubble next to the chimney, which still stood amidst the charred ruins. She made a small noise in the back of her throat and rushed forward. Afraid of making any sudden noise, the others didn't call out to stop her, but watched as she brushed away the rubble and, with a look of revulsion, retrieved the human bone.

“Jesus,” Tommy breathed. “Some distraction.”

“They must have staged remains in the house before they burned it,” said Oliver, his own face impassive but his tone betraying his distaste. “The League wouldn't have fallen for it for it long, but it would have taken them some time to establish that the bodies didn't belong to us.” 

Having picked up the bone, Felicity was holding it awkwardly before her. She didn't want to discard it like trash, but she wasn't sure what to do with it, and the greasy, pocked surface was beginning to turn her stomach. Oliver stepped forward and, without speaking, gently took the bone away from her. He placed it, equally gently, on the ground.

“I wonder who they were,” said Felicity, trying and failing to keep her voice steady.

After a long silence, Roy said it. “I wonder if they were dead before the fire.”

Felicity shivered and, feeling his gaze on her, turned to Oliver. His eyes were dark and unreadable, but she knew what he was he thinking. If this was what Katherine could do for the sake of a diversion, what might she do to someone she really wanted to hurt?


	14. Chapter 14

Roy waited while Oliver covered the bone with debris so that, if anyone were to come by the ruins, it wouldn't be evident that anyone had been there. It seemed to him that Oliver was taking an unnecessarily long time over it as Tommy and Felicity pulled farther ahead, and he knew that Oliver didn't do anything without a reason.

When Felicity and Tommy were out of hearing range, Oliver stood up and casually dusted the ash off his hands. He began to walk without looking or speaking to Roy. Roy fell into step a half pace behind him and waited.

“I know that this is... tough,” Oliver began. “The thing with Felicity, I mean.”

“Look,” Roy started, wanting to spare Oliver discomfort. “I'll only do it if you want me to. I think the whole thing sounds stupid, anyway.”

Oliver stopped and turned to face him suddenly. “It's not stupid. You saw what Katherine is capable of... those bodies back there.”

“Maybe they were already dead, and she just... dug them up.” Roy had to admit it wasn't a much more appealing possibility.

“Maybe. Or maybe they were people – League or Kawani – who got in her way. Look, I need you to take this seriously, OK?” Oliver turned away and started walking again, but more slowly.

“So... you held me back to give me a pep talk about dating your girlfriend?” Again, Roy fell into pace behind him.

“I held you back to tell you that I'm depending on you. Make Katherine believe it. I can't... I can't protect her down there.” Oliver swallowed, as if the words themselves gave him pain. “You're the only one who can, so I need you to do it. Make it real – as real as you can. Please, Roy.”

Roy had never heard such naked desperation in Oliver's voice. Always before, Oliver had been the one who led the way, who knew the path – and Roy followed, knowing that if Oliver had chosen it, it was a path worth going down. Now, looking at the haunted cast of Oliver’s eyes, Roy remembered how he had felt in that subway car; utterly powerless, staring down the barrel of death; and how, at the moment when he was most afraid, most lost, Oliver had come. Oliver had not only saved him, but had turned him into someone worth saving.

Now he could see in Oliver's eyes the reflection of that barrel – Oliver was staring down his own terror.

“It's going to hurt,” he said softly.

“I know,” said Oliver. They walked in silence for what seemed like a long time. “Promise me.”

Even before they heard the sound of a twig snapping to their left, both men hit the ground. Roy felt the kiss of the arrow as it brushed softly past his cheek and lodged itself in a tree trunk behind him. They hardly had time to make it to their feet before another arrow flew – but this one was sent in the direction of Felicity and Tommy, who had were far ahead of them by now.

Heedless of danger, Roy and Oliver both sprinted ahead, trying to reach the others before their attacker did. No more arrows flew as they reached a stand of short, scrubby trees and crouched down next to Tommy and Felicity, who had made cover before either of them had been hit.

Then, Roy heard an odd clucking noise coming from the direction of the attack. The expression on both Oliver's and Tommy's faces changed – Oliver's to puzzled recollection, and Tommy's to fury. Before Roy could grab the latter, he had stood up and marched out of the stand of trees into the clearing, making a clear target of himself.

“Goddammit, N'sal. Are you kidding me?”

A woman stepped into the clearing. In the light of the crescent moon, she stood casually, one hip cocked, a bow slung loosely around her shoulder. Despite her relaxed stance, Roy wouldn't have wanted to gamble on the speed of her reflexes – something about the way she held the bow implied that she could have another arrow loosed in their direction before he would have time to take her down.

“Stop bringing strangers to my home. I'll stop shooting them.” The young woman, her long, straight, black hair falling over her shoulders like a cloak, shrugged and spoke conversationally. “Let me guess. More heroes, come to rescue us?”

Next to him, Roy could feel Felicity shift position, and Oliver tense automatically – presumably ready to leap into action, in case Felicity made a move that put in her in danger. But Felicity was only pushing back the layers of cloth on her arm – first the heavy sealskin and fur, then the wool, and finally the light synthetic layer that she wore beneath it all – to reveal the leather cuff given to her by the senile old man back at Rocky's. She looked at the cuff, and then back up at N'sal.

“Huh,” she said, softly.

Roy didn't have time to ask what she meant.

“You can come out,” N'sal called. “There are no League scouts in the area. I've been patrolling for days.”

“Maybe it's not the League we're concerned about,” Oliver called back, without moving.

Roy saw the young woman roll her eyes. “Oh, please. I stepped on a twig, didn't I? Believe me, if I wanted you dead, you'd be dead.”

Oliver stood up and stepped forward, but held his hand behind his back, palm outward, to tell Roy and Felicity to stay put.

A slow, mocking smile spread over N'sal's face. “Aw. You're not going to bring your friends out to meet me?” With the speed of a lion pouncing, she had her bow drawn and another arrow flew. This time, it skimmed Felicity's cheek before being embedded in the trunk behind her. “It's not like they're especially safe where they are.”

With one glance, Oliver ascertained that Felicity was not badly injured – and then he turned to N'sal. Through the fabric of his thick cloak, Roy thought that he could see the muscles in Oliver's back coil in anticipation. The scene unfolded in Roy's imagination – Oliver springing at N'sal, the fight that Oliver, fueled by rage, would surely win. The explanations of why Oliver had gotten so bent out of shape over a scrape on a friend's cheek.

Roy's mind raced. What would he do if someone had taken a shot at Thea?

He launched himself at N'sal, not giving himself time to think. “Stay the hell away from her!”

He had moved more slowly than Oliver, driven by thought rather than reflex, but the suddenness of his leap had interrupted the other other man and bought him a few precious seconds to think. It took only a split second for Oliver to change the course of his own movement, grab Roy, and make a show of holding him back.

“She's OK,” Oliver growled, still glaring at N'sal. His arms were wrapped around Roy like a vice, cutting off circulation, but Roy was grateful that he had recollected himself in time. He didn't mind bearing the brunt of Oliver's anger, if it meant protecting their lie. “Leave it.”

Felicity stood. A few drops of blood, looking in the darkness like tears, were trickling down her face, but she stood tall and, when she spoke, her voice was rock-steady. “You've made your point, then. Should we introduce ourselves, or would you like to shoot at us some more?” She walked past where Oliver and Roy were still locked in an odd embrace, and where Tommy was standing with his arms crossed, glaring at the woman.

“I'm Felicity. I would say it's nice to meet you, but it's not, because you shot me.” Felicity stuck out her hand. It was a good move – it forced N'sal to either ignore her and appear petulant, or shoulder her bow and return the gesture.

She did the latter. “N'sal. Would you like to tell me what the hell you're doing on my land?”

Felicity raised her eyebrows. “Your land? I thought it belonged to the League.” She had not released N'sal's hand, and even in the darkness Roy could see her knuckles whitening.

N'sal gritted her teeth. “Only by theft.”

Felicity held her gaze. “And not for long, I would guess,” she said softly.

“No. Not for long.” Finally, N'sal dropped Felicity's hand, wincing.

Felicity stepped back and spoke lightly. “We didn't mean to intrude. We came for Oliver, and he told us that he had unfinished business here.”

“So you invited yourselves along.” N'sal's face was meditative. It was impossible to tell what she was thinking.

“We invited them.” Tommy finally stepped forward. “They can help.”

“And we aren't leaving without Oliver.” Felicity's tone was still light, but with an undercurrent of steel. “So you can accept our help or we can stay out of the way. It's your call.”

“And how can you help?” asked N'sal, wryly, opening and closing her hand as if to restore circulation. "What possible use could you be to us?"

********************

Ray pounded on the desk. “Where the hell is Felicity?” he growled. “This stupid program makes no sense!”

Digg sat down next to him and sighed heavily. They had been working on the face recognition all day and all night, entering different parameters and comparing the results from traffic camera footage of the night of the mirakuru invasion. They were tired, they hadn't showered or eaten, and they were getting nowhere. “It's not the program. We're just not giving it enough to work with.”

“I want it to show me all men with glasses caught on tape of a five block radius of Anna's murder!” Ray glared at Digg. “How hard is that?”

“Don't ask me,” Digg said. He nodded at the computer. “Ask that.”

They contemplated the screen morosely. Digg knew that Ray was a genius, but he wasn't an expert in any one area – not like Felicity. They had overestimated his ability to fill her role. Her programs, several of which she had made more user-friendly - or “idiot-proof,” as she liked to say -- for Digg’s and Roy's benefit, were generally not easy to understand or to use. And she hadn't gotten around to creating an idiot-proof version of her face-recognition software, which was several times more accurate and more comprehensive than anything available through A.R.G.U.S. or Starling City PD. Which they couldn’t access anyway, without Felicity.

“We shouldn't have let her go. It was selfish of her to go. Roy could have gone alone.” But Digg knew that Ray wasn't really angry with Felicity. As the days went by without hearing from her, Ray had been getting more short-tempered, more terse. He was desperately worried and, Digg had to admit to himself, he had good reason. The only reason that the others would have gone so long without sending word was if something was stopping them. With every day that went by without hearing from them, the picture was starting to look worse.

Digg stood up. They were spinning their wheels here. “Go home.”

Ray looked startled. “What? We have work to do!”

“Yeah, and we can't do it if we're exhausted.”

“I'm not exhausted.” There was a stubborn set to Ray's face.

“Well, I am.” Digg stretched. “And I'm not hanging out down here with you anymore. You smell like old pizza, man. Go home and take a shower.”

Ray glared at him. “We've got a lead to who gave Connor the device and who killed Anna, and you want me to go home and shower?”

“I second that request.” They looked to the landing where, covered by the sound of their argument, Laurel had entered quietly. She wrinkled her nose. “It smells like cheese in here.” She walked down the stairs, looking around. “Where is everyone?”

“Vacation,” said Ray, at the same time that Digg said, “A.R.G.U.S. mission.”

Laurel tilted her head. “Well, I've never known the Arrow to take a vacation, and I don't think that Lyla would have taken everyone on a mission but you, so why don't I take back my question and we can pretend that you didn't both just lie to me?” She looked at Ray. “So the new head of Queen Consolidated – sorry, 'Turner Industries,' – is also the newest member of Team Arrow? That's... unexpected.” She braced a hip against the prep table and crossed her arms.

“Maybe not as unexpected as the mild-mannered Assistant District Attorney dressing up in a black pleather bodysuit to deal out street justice every night.”

Laurel grinned. “Not every night. Sometimes I have to work late.”

“So the Starling City ADA knows that Oliver Queen was the Arrow.” Digg saw the change in Ray's expression when he realized that he had used the past tense, but Laurel didn't seem to notice, and Ray rushed on. “I would ask who else knows, but it seems like the list of who doesn't know might be shorter.”

Laurel shrugged. “It's hard to keep secrets from old friends. The only other person who found out was Tommy, but he....” A shadow passed over her face. Digg realized that it had been a long time since she had talked about Tommy – since any of them had. He reminded himself to tell her someday that it was because of Tommy that Oliver had stopped killing. It was a statement about the kind of man that Tommy had been, and she had a right to be proud of him for that. “He's gone. So that's pretty much it. Digg, Roy, Felicity. I was the newest member of the club, but now it looks like you are.” She turned to Digg. “Look, I was hoping to talk to Oliver, but since he's not here...” she chewed her lower lip, thoughtfully, and frowned.

“What's up, Laurel?” Digg perched on the desk across from and leaned forward.

“I got a phone call from my dad. He sounded... weird.”

“Is he OK?” Digg was already halfway off the desk, ready to grab his gun, but when Laurel spoke again he relaxed.

“He's fine. At least, he says he's fine. He just – he sounded freaked out.” Laurel tucked her hair behind her ear and frowned. “He wants me to get out of town. He wouldn't say why, but when I said that I wasn't going to just up and leave, he said that he needed to talk to me in person. I begged him to tell me what was up, but he said that we couldn't talk about it over the phone.” She shook her head. “He was really scared, Digg. He wanted to get me a police escort to bring me down to the station, but I wanted to talk to Oliver first, to see if something's going on that I don't know about. So is there? Something going on?” She met Digg's gaze evenly. “Where is Oliver really, Digg?”

Digg shook his head, but he didn't look away. “I'll tell you as soon as we know for sure. I promise.”

“Know for sure?” Her brow creased. “Know what for sure?” Then,when Digg didn't respond, the color drained out of her face. “Oh,” she whispered. She shook her own head, but it didn't seem to be a denial – rather, she appeared to be trying to make the knowledge fit. Then she looked back up at him. “But you're not sure. That's what you're saying. You don't know.”

“Maybe not, but we don't have a lot of reason to hope.” Ray spoke up, and Laurel turned to him.

“They told me he was dead before, but he came back.” Her voice was flat, her eyes hard. “You don't understand. Oliver Queen is very hard to kill.”  

Digg stood up and, gently, took her hand, holding it until she returned her gaze to him. When he spoke, his voice was soft. “So was Sara.”

It was a low blow. Her eyes filled with tears, but before they could spill, she took a deep breath and set her jaw. She nodded, sharply. “Yes, she was. And that's why it would have been stupid to believe it if we hadn't seen her body.” She turned back to Ray. “I've mourned Oliver Queen enough for one lifetime. I'm not going to begin again unless I have a damn good reason to. Until then, tell him to give me a call when he gets home.” She turned on her heel and took the stairs two at a time on her way out.

 

********************

Since Roy had kept him from losing his head, Oliver had been silent, watching the battle of wills between N'sal and Felicity, waiting for his pounding heart to slow. Now, he spoke up. “I work with Felicity and Roy back home. I depend on them. If you need my help, you need their help.”

“I don't need anyone's help,” said N'sal automatically, but now she was sizing up Roy as though he was hanging in a butcher shop window. He bristled under her stare. “But I suppose they're here now.” She turned businesslike, nodding in the direction in which they had been heading before her attack. “Let's get going. The sun will be up in an hour.”

“We'll never make it back to the entrance in time. We'll have to make camp.” Tommy sounded frustrated.

“I thought we'd use the secret entrance,” N'sal said, and her sudden grin as she looked up at Tommy transformed her. Tommy smiled back at her even as his voice was doubtful. “Isn't it a little cold for that?”

N'sal shrugged. “Desperate measures. We need to hurry if we're going to get there before the sun, though.” And suddenly, she was gone. The brown suede she wore was a momentary shadow against the moonlit snow before she disappeared into the trees.

Tommy looked back at them. “We'd better catch up. She won't wait.” But Oliver was already moving, and Felicity had been close on N'sal's heels.

They ran like wolves, weaving in and out of stands of trees like shadows on the snow. Roy ran close behind Oliver, Felicity up ahead and to his left. It was as if he had an extra sense that let him know where they were at all times – in the movement of the air, the crunch of their feet breaking the crust of the snow, Felicity's subtly sweet smell drifting back to him on the cold air, the rhythm of Roy's breathing at his back. He wondered how he had ever done this – any of it – alone, and he was suddenly profoundly grateful that they had come looking for them.

N'sal and Tommy had been running together, at the head of the group. Then, in a flash, N'sal was gone. It wasn't like before, when she had started running – that had been fast, but he had been able to trace the direction of her flight. This time, she simply vanished.

Oliver, Felicity, and Roy caught up with Tommy. They circled him, breathing heavily, as he knelt down and moved aside a pile of brush. At first glance, it seemed to reveal a rocky outcrop like the hundreds that they had already seen. Some were massive, boulders that towered over their heads, and some were nothing more than small piles of rocks. This one was medium-sized. Three large, flat stones lay in a circle, about the area of a car. In the center, they overlapped – or appeared to. Upon closer inspection, it was clear that there was a long, jagged gash that ran through the center of the circle and widened in the center, until it was just about large enough for a body to fit through.

“Seriously?” said Felicity. “There?”

Tommy grinned and cocked an eyebrow at Oliver, as though laying down a challenge. “I've done it before... during the summer.” Then he, too, was gone, having lowered himself through the gap. Far below, Oliver heard a splash.

“This is going to suck.” Roy knelt down, trying to see into the darkness below. Then he shrugged and, like Tommy - though more slowly - lowered himself through. A moment's pause, and another splash.

Oliver looked at Felicity, who was approaching the hole doubtfully. “Wait,” he said, and he could feel as his heart began to pound again.

It seemed that, in its final moments before drifting below the horizon, the moon was trying to spill the last of its reflected glow all at once. Felicity stood in the middle of a pool of light, stilled by his voice, but poised for flight. Despite the pre-dawn darkness, her hair gleamed a deep, rich gold. Before he knew what he was doing, he reached out and brushed it, lightly, where it fell over her shoulder. The memory of snow, of arrows, of rock and wool fell away until all that his fingertips knew was her softness. He wanted so much more – to draw her to him, to bury his face in her neck, to feel her skin, hot on his skin. This was his last chance – the last moment before he had to pretend not to love her. He wanted to tell her now that it would be pretend, that in order to stop loving her for real he would have to crack open his chest and drag out his living heart.

She stood like stone, neither pulling away nor moving closer, her eyes wary. She had crossed a continent for him. Whatever distance remained between them, it was up to him to close.

Did she understand that these last few feet, these final few moments, were as hard for him as the first thousand had been for her? He opened his mouth to say it, and stopped.

Because after he said it, then what? What about when they went home? He had nothing to promise her. He still didn't know if it was true, what Tommy said – if he should dare to try to be happy, or if that would mean endangering everything, including her.

Never, until this moment, had he truly wanted to go back in time. He knew he was a better man for what had happened to him on the island. But now he thought about the boy he had been before he stepped onto the yacht, and wondered what would have happened if he had met – fallen for – Felicity back then. Every dream, every wish she had ever had, he would have had the means to make come true. For a moment, he let himself imagine it - the private plane trips, the little blue boxes - the look on her face as, one after another, he topped each gift with the next one. He thought of every romantic surprise he had ever planned for every woman that he had loved less than her, and realized now what a waste it had been. He wanted to give her the world, and he couldn't even give her tomorrow.

He shook his head at her, helplessly. Her eyes fluttered downward, briefly, and when they returned to him they were full of what may have been sorrow, or may have been resignation. She stepped back, severing their connection, and an almost unbearable ache began to grow in his chest, making it suddenly hard to breathe. Without bothering to lower herself slowly like Roy, she stepped over the void, and was gone.


	15. Chapter 15

When Felicity hit the water, it took a few moments for her brain to catch up with what her body was experiencing. Even then, she didn’t process it as cold. She just became aware that her muscles didn’t seem to be obeying her commands.

Everything was dark. She knew she had to get out of the way before Oliver landed on her, but she didn’t know which way was land. She struck out blindly.

“Wrong way!” called Roy from somewhere behind her. “Over here!”

She turned to the sound of his voice and forced her arms and legs to move. Slowly, clumsily, she began to kick in his direction.  Even her lungs seemed to be having trouble working properly, no matter how desperately she tried to fill them. She wouldn't even need to drown- she was suffocating in the open air. She tried to force herself to calm down.

“The cold will make you hyperventilate. You have to slow your breathing.” Nyssa’s voice floated out of the darkness, infuriatingly calm and steady. Felicity would have like to hit her, but she didn’t think she’d be able to form her hand into a fist.

“Oh…. really?” she gasped. “Any… idea… how?” Her legs were slowing, stars forming before her eyes. Behind her, she heard a splash and, after a moment, a gasp, as Oliver dropped from above.

“Breathe out for longer than you breathe in,” suggested Roy, matter-of-factly. His voice was calm but she could hear him splashing as he began to make his way back toward her. She figured that, if he was trying to spend one second more than absolutely necessary in this frigid water, she must really be in trouble. The thought seemed to come from a distance, though. As her legs continued to slow, she began to feel a seeping warmth creep up from her feet. She wondered if she could hold onto it if she stopped kicking. She stilled her legs and began to slip under the water.

Just before she went under, a strong, hard arm looped itself around her waist. She would have liked to pull away, to keep going under towards the warmth, but she couldn’t move.

“I’ve got you,” whispered Oliver, in her ear. “Just keep breathing. OK? Keep breathing.”

She wasn’t sure whether or not she was awake, but the next thing she knew, she was lying with something hard and uneven beneath her back, and someone was calling her name. 

“Ugh,” she mumbled, trying to turn over and go to sleep. But the surface felt like a thousand tiny boots kicking her all at once, and she was suddenly aware of the cold. It was worse than anything she'd ever felt, worse even than that long night after the inlet crossing. She started to shiver, so hard she was afraid her bones were about to break. She opened her eyes to see four floating heads. Tommy’s and Roy’s showed concern;  N’sal’s was a careful blank; and Oliver’s, darkly mottled with anger, receded as he sat back.

“That was stupid,” he growled at N’sal. “You knew how cold that water would be. It was a stupid risk.”

She shrugged. “I thought we were in a hurry. How was I supposed to know that the princess couldn’t handle it?”

Before Oliver or Roy could respond, Tommy spoke up. “Don’t be a jerk,” he said, evenly. “I only made it because you helped me. We’re lucky that Oliver got to her when he did.”

“Sorry,” muttered Roy to Felicity, raising her and wrapping his own sopping wet coat around her shoulders. Felicity noticed that Oliver’s hands were white-knuckled fists at his side. “I should have waited for you before I started for shore.”

“Don’t be stupid,” Felicity forced out through chattering teeth. “You just would have gone under too. How is that water not frozen at this time of year?” She wanted to change the subject. Oliver was still looking at N’sal through narrowed eyes, and she was too cold, and too tired, to think of another way to defuse him. It's like dating a grenade, she thought. Only without the dating part. And a grenade only blows up once.

“High mineral content.” Tommy seemed to understand, and join, her peacekeeping mission. “Including salt. It freezes at about the same temperature as the ocean.”

Roy put his hands under Felicity’s arms and hoisted her to her feet. “If I never have to think about the freezing point of different types of water again, it will be too soon.” Looking warily at Oliver, he drew her close, slinging an arm around her. “I didn’t drop out of high school because I was good at science.”

Felicity knew that she should be close to someone, for the warmth, but she hadn’t been prepared for how strange the charade with Roy would feel. It had seemed so silly up above, but as she took in the massive underground cavern, it became increasingly clear to her that she knew nothing about the Kawani or their world. She remembered the charred bone in the clearing and shivered, then tucked her own arm around Roy and leaned into him, feeling Oliver’s gaze on them like a physical force. Her cheeks flushed, and she prayed that N’sal would chalk it up to returning blood flow. “We should get moving,” she said. Even N’sal was shivering, though trying to hide it. “Before one of us catches hypothermia.”

N’sal and Tommy took the lead. Felicity noticed that they were careful not to touch - even when Tommy stumbled on freezing feet, N’sal simply stopped and waited while he regained his footing. Felicity wondered if N’sal, like her, was waiting - unable to hope, but unwilling to move on until she was certain there was no hope. Felicity was suddenly furious with Tommy. Either you love someone or you don’t. Make up your mind! She stormed on, tripping on her own increasingly numb feet.

Before they had reached the end of the tunnel, Felicity made out a figure coming towards them - running towards them -- and automatically reached for her bow, before realizing that she had left it with her pack on the surface. Damn.

But the woman who was approaching them didn’t appear threatening - if anything, she seemed concerned. She looked a bit like N’sal, but that might have been the effect of the similar clothing that they wore, and their tall, slim builds. This woman’s hair was curly and had been sheared away at her chin, with more attention to convenience than to appearance. Still, there was something appealing about her round face and large, wide-set eyes. She was followed by a slim young man moving at a more sedate pace, carrying a thermos and a stack of blankets.

“One of the men was out patrolling and saw some packs piled by the old entrance. He got a message to us to look out for intruders, but I knew that it was more likely to be you, pulling some stupid trick. I was hoping that you couldn’t be that dumb.” She turned impatiently back to the young man, who was catching up, but clearly not quickly enough for her, then turned back to size up N’sal’s dripping wet hair and triumphant grin.

“We saved a full day of travel in an area where the League regularly scouts.”

“You left evidence of yourselves in plain sight and risked freezing to death!” The young man had finally caught up, and the woman grabbed the stack of blankets and began handing them out. N’sal declined a blanket even though she was still shivering. Felicity rolled her eyes and took the extra blanket for herself.

“The League knows that they’re here. Hiding the packs would have been a waste of time.” Still, uncertainty flickered in N’sal’s eyes, and Felicity wished that they had taken the time to at least disguise the packs with brush. She wished, too, that she had held onto her bow during the fall, as Oliver, Roy, and N’sal had. She wouldn’t have thought that she would feel so naked without it.

The other woman sighed. “I’ve sent people to retrieve them. We’ll have them here in a day or so.” She turned to the others, and pasted a smile on top of her annoyance. “I’m Kaya. I had come to welcome you back, but I see that I have more welcoming to do than I’d expected.” She held her hand out to Felicity, and then to Roy, who each shook it in turn, though it seemed somewhat pointless, since Felicity still couldn't feel her own extremities.

Kaya made each of them take a drink of hot, foul tasting liquid from the thermos. Felicity gagged, but almost immediately began to feel warmer. She noticed that, unlike the blanket, N’sal didn’t pass up this aid.

Kaya kept up a quiet, but steady, stream of speech as they made their way through the last section of the tunnel. She told them about the history of the mines, and of the Kawani in the area, and even pointed out some interesting geological features of the tunnel. Felicity felt absurdly as though they were on a school field trip, and realized that Kaya hadn’t asked any questions about what she and Roy were doing here. She wondered if Kaya, unlike her sister, planned to wait until their guard was down before trying to get any information out of them. It was working - Felicity leaned heavily on Roy and her eyelids began to flicker as she was lulled by the soft, warm voice.

She was almost asleep on her feet by the time they reached the golden glow at the end of a tunnel and stepped into a large, warm, welcoming room, but she blinked herself awake when she caught sight of the long tables set up with microscopes, petri dishes, and thick sheaths of dry, yellowing paper. Without waiting for an invitation, she made her way towards them, noticing the familiar, sour-sweet smell of chemical preservatives. She ran her hand gently along the broken binding of one book that looked like it had been bound with the same leather that had been used to make her cuff. The book had been less well cared for, though, and instead of glowing softly in the candlelight, it was dull and warped by moisture and time. Felicity was afraid to open it - it looked like it might turn to dust in her hands.

“Go ahead,” said a soft voice next to her. “It’s tougher than it looks.” Kaya was watching Felicity curiously. Felicity looked around and saw that Roy, like her, had in his semi-frozen, half asleep state made automatically gravitated toward the corner of the room that felt most like home - the training ring - and was now watching two strangers spar. Oliver and Tommy were still standing by the entrance, speaking with an older woman with strong, lovely features and straight, jet-black hair that was even longer than N’sal’s. N’sal herself was standing near the group, but she was watching Felicity, her eyes, like Kaya’s, bright with curiosity. Of course - they were sisters. Felicity hadn’t been sure of the resemblance before, but now, looking from one set of inquisitive eyes to another, she thought that they might have been twins.

Felicity opened the book. Kaya was right - the paper was thick, pressed pulp, lacking modern chemicals that would have made it crumble. It turned easily in Felicity’s hands.

The writing was unlike any alphabet that she could recognize, though she thought that it might bear some resemblance to Arabic. She could identify the graphics, though, and frowned in puzzlement.

“I don’t understand,” she said to Kaya. “This book clearly pre-dates cell theory, but these - these are drawings of cells, aren’t they?”

Kaya smiled. “It pre-dates the European discovery of cell theory. But the Kawani were always quite adept at magnification technology. It has allowed us to look inward, into the body, and outward, into the stars, far earlier than most other cultures. These are drawings of cells, yes. Specifically, the cells of the algae that I’m sure your friends have told you about.” She ran a hand over one of the drawings, thoughtfully. “Incidentally, our early understanding of the physical nature of the body has made our culture quite unsentimental about many things. For example, we had no inconvenient cultural hang-ups about digging up old bodies to use as decoys when we burned down Tommy's old cabin. In fact, I'm afraid N'sal might have sort of enjoyed it.” She smiled at Felicity, wryly. “I find that it’s much easier not to have to kill someone every time you need a body.”

Again, Felicity had to remind herself that she had no reason to trust Kaya - but she wanted to. Despite the speech about digging up bodies. This was the only person she'd talked to in ages - since saying goodbye to Ray - who seemed interested in solving problems Felicity's way, by looking at it from a thousand different angles until one of them made sense. By being curious about a problem first - about what made it a problem, and how to make it a not-problem - as opposed to just shooting at it and waiting to see if it gets back up again.

“You're studying the algae,” Felicity realized, looking at the rows and rows of petri dishes with blooms in them at different stages of growth.

Kaya frowned. “I try. After we were driven underground, many of our records were lost, and it took nearly a generation just to understand the full extent of what we no longer know. Not to mention the fact that most Kawani are more interested in becoming warriors, in order to reclaim our land, than they are in research. As a result, our heritage is being lost.” She shrugged, as if she was referring to lost car keys, but the frown remained. “Some few members of the younger generation are interested in learning, and we keep working. If we can understand the algae’s effects, maybe we can control them - replicate them, even magnify them. We have a substance that can cure every known ill, injury, disease, and but until we understand it better, its use when it’s transported is severely limited.” She shook her head in frustration.

“So you have transported it? Used it in other places?”

Kaya looked guarded, as though she had said more than she intended. “Yes… at times. Your friend Oliver knew of its use as a dried powder - I assumed that you did too.”

Felicity remembered the herbs in Oliver’s trunk that he used in emergencies. “He doesn’t tell me… us… everything." Anything. "He brought it back with him from the island. That’s all I know.”

Kaya frowned. “Island?”

“Lian Yu… where Oliver was stranded.” Felicity frowned. “Didn’t you know?”

But the color had drained from Kaya’s face. “That’s where he found the powder? Lian Yu?” She looked furtively at her sister, who was watching them closely, then turned her back and looked piercingly at Felicity. “I need you to trust me, and the only way to get you to do that is for me to trust you." Kaya seemed to be having a silent argument with herself. Evidently, she won. The line that had creased her forehead smoothed out and she sighed, suddenly, as if a great weight had been lifted off her shoulders. "So I'm going to tell you about the algae - about what happened last time I tried to modify it for broader use.” She looked around again, haunted. “It’s a long story. I’ll need time to tell it to you. And I could use an extra set of hands… will you help me with my research? We’ll have privacy to talk, and maybe a fresh set of eyes will --”

At that moment, the older woman who had been speaking to Oliver and Tommy strode over. She reached out, and Felicity automatically flinched, though her only intent was to grasp one of Felicity’s hands warmly in both of hers. Roy broke away from the fighting and joined them, and she repeated the gesture with him. Something about the studied grace of the gesture unsettled Felicity. She preferred N’sal’s honest hostility to this woman’s practiced warmth.

“I’m Katherine.” The woman’s voice was deep and musical, but it sent chills down Felicity’s spine. This, then, was the woman that Oliver saw as such a threat. Felicity understood why. Something very old and cunning looked back at her from behind the woman’s eyes. She didn’t have to fake her impulse to take a step back, closer to Roy. He, as he had been all along, was more mindful of their deception. Aware that this was their crucial audience, he slipped his hand onto the small of Felicity’s back. It was a casual, but possessive, gesture. Katherine’s eyes registered it, as they had Felicity’s instinctive retreat towards him. For a moment she sized them up, and Felicity felt her heart rate begin to pick up. Sell it.

She leaned back, ever so slightly, to feel the reassuring pressure on her back. If it had been Oliver, that would have been all she needed - the slightest touch, to remind her that he was there. Katherine registered the movement, and her gaze dismissed them as irrelevant even as she spoke about welcoming them.

“Kaya and Daniel will help you get settled. I am sorry that my daughter brought you here the way she did - it was unkind.” Katherine glared at N’sal, who dropped her gaze to the ground. “But Kaya’s tea will help, and the warm baths will help more. Oliver informs me that you want to stay close to him - we will lay out pallets for you by his. I’m sorry that the accommodations aren’t more luxurious, but we will do our best to keep you comfortable.”

“We don’t mean to intrude,” said Felicity, automatically falling back on the manners that her mother had drilled into her in childhood. It was an absurd thing to say, given her earlier speech to N'sal about refusing to leave, but the other women had the grace to pretend that it was genuine.

"You are not intruders,” said Kaya, softly but firmly, and looking meaningfully at her sister. “I’m sure that you will be a great help to us.”

“If you are willing. You have no obligation to us, or our mission,” said Katherine, giving her daughter a warning look.

Roy seemed unaware of the undercurrents of family tension as Kaya herded him and Felicity towards one tunnel, and Daniel led Tommy and Oliver to another. “Any mission of Oliver’s is a mission of ours,” he said, cheerfully, reaching out for Felicity's hand.

 

********************

 

Ray dreamed of Anna. That wasn’t unusual, though it had been happening less and less since he had met Felicity. Usually, the dreams were horrible - nothing more than a gruesome, slow-motion replay of their final moments together. Sometimes she spoke to him, gurgling through her blood, telling him that he had let her down, how much pain she was in, begging him to help her. Those were the worst dreams - the ones that drove him out of bed and into the office at all hours of the night. The ones that had kept him awake for days on end, sending him into the feverish, frantic state in which he had had the first glimmer of an idea for A.T.O.M.

This dream was different from the beginning. First of all, the sun was shining - so warmly that he could feel a trail of sweat trickling down the back of his neck. He was on the beach, running to the rhythm of the crashing surf. And, he realized with a pang of desperate joy, Anna was running next to him.

Her chestnut hair was pulled into a high ponytail that cascaded over the visor she always wore when she went running. It was one that he had gotten for her, as a joke, when she had told him that she didn’t plan to change her name after their marriage. The visor was bright blue, and had “Mrs. Ray” embroidered on it in bright white letters. In return, she had gotten him a pair of boxers with “Mr. Anna” stamped on the rear in block lettering.

He swallowed the lump in his throat. He wanted, badly, to stop and look at her, but he somehow knew that if they stopped running she would vanish. He couldn’t bear the thought of that.

“I miss you,” he said, looking straight ahead. He wanted to wail, to make her understand the depth of his pain, but he was afraid of frightening her away. “I miss you so much that I can’t stand it sometimes.”

“But sometimes, you can.” She spoke lightly and he felt her hand, damp with sweat and sea spray, enclose his. “More and more, these days.”

“Anna…” How could he explain to her what it was like, loving two women? He still missed her so much that every cell in his body screamed with the agony of it. And yet, when he was with Felicity… it was like he had been living in the dark for so long that he had forgotten to notice that it was dark, and then someone had opened the window and the sunlight had flooded in.

Anna laughed, and the sound was so familiar that he wanted to weep. “Relax, Ray. I'm dead. Jealousy isn’t really an issue where I am.” When she spoke again, her voice was gentle. “If you honestly don’t know that I want you to be happy, then you’re too stupid to deserve her, anyway.”

She was fading. Her hand in his grew cooler, less substantial, until he was only holding his own closed fist. Desperate, in the last moment, he turned to her and reached out, trying to draw her close to him.

But she was gone, and the beach was fading, too. He closed his eyes, and when he opened them, he was in his own room, alone. In the double bed that he had bought when he had grown tired, night after night, of reaching out to Anna’s side of their king-sized and discovering that she wasn’t there.

He closed his eyes again, trying to hold on to the last fragments of the image. For the first time since her death, his dream of her had felt like the real her - not like like a grief-crazed fever dream. Half asleep still, he allowed himself, for a moment, to believe in an afterlife. Had she come to tell him that she wanted him to move on, with Felicity?

Then he sat bolt upright.

Mrs. Ray. He grinned, and then began to laugh softly to himself. Anna wouldn’t waste a dream visitation on telling him to move on and be happy. No, she would expect him to figure that out for himself. If Anna was going to reach over from the other side, she would save up the effort for something really important.

He reached for his cell phone where he always kept it on the bedside table. Digg picked up after five rings. In the background, Ray could hear a baby crying. Oops.

“You have got to be kidding me.” Digg’s voice was rough with sleep and irritation.

“Sorry.” Once more, Ray’s teeth gleamed in the dark. He wasn’t sorry at all. “Digg, listen to me. I figured it out.”

“Dammit, do you have any idea how long it takes to get her back to sleep?” There was the muffled sound of Digg covering the phone with his hand, then his voice, slightly softer - “Try the pink elephant - no, the pink one, the blue one gives her nightmares. Yes, it does. Yes, it does.” His voice returned in full force, interested in spite of himself. “Figured what out?”

“How to find the man who killed Anna.”


	16. Chapter 16

Ray slammed into the basement, triumphantly waving a receipt like a flag of victory. Digg looked up from his perch, where he was cleaning his gun in between long sips of hot black coffee.

“You call me up at 3 a.m.,” he said, almost conversationally. “Waking up Sara and Lyla. Not to mention me. You say something cryptic, tell me to meet you here, hang up, and then, when I get here, you don’t show up for another hour.” He slowly, carefully slotted the firing pin into place. “Dramatic non sequiturs and a total lack of personal consideration.” He spun the empty chamber and then, casually, tested the sight while aiming at Ray. “It’s almost like working with Oliver again.”

“See, now, if I’d gotten here on time, you never would have had time to practice that whole speech in your head.” Ray ignored the gun aimed at him and slapped the receipt - an old-fashioned, handwritten carbon copy - down on the desk in front of Digg.

“I bought Anna a visor.”

Silently, Digg crossed his arms and waited.

“From this guy. This shop. One of those places where they customize t-shirts, and things like that? Tiny little shop. Weird old guy who runs it.”

“And you, the technology mogul, didn’t think to just place the order online?”

Ray shrugged. “I like to support local business.”

Digg gritted his teeth and breathed out once, very slowly. “Ray,” he said, his voice patient as the grave. “I know that you have a colorful personality. I know that you don’t always do things in a straight line. Eccentric, some would call you. But Ray, it is 4:30 in the frigging morning. I slept for two hours last night. Two hours.” Digg leaned forward and glared into Ray’s innocent gaze. “And I swear to God, if you don’t start this story at the beginning pretty damn soon, I am going to snap you in two. Like a twig, Ray. Start the goddamned story at the goddamned beginning.”

Ray did.

********************

 

Kaya led Felicity and Roy to a small, private enclave whose primary feature was a deep, steaming bath in the middle. Kaya had placed towels and robes on the floor of the clean, bare room, and had turned to go.

“Um… we share the bath?” Felicity had asked, panic in her voice.

Kaya turned back with her eyebrows raised. “That’s a problem? I thought you two were….”

“We are,” said Ray, firmly, stepping forward. “It’s no problem.” He smiled at Kaya and shrugged. “She just gets a little possessive about her bathroom time.”

“Oh… yeah,” said Felicity. “We can share it. Which is what we do at home. In our bathroom…. which we share. Together.”

Roy put his hand around her waist in a way that looked affectionate from the outside, but squeezed in a way that clearly meant, please, God, stop talking. Felicity stopped talking.

As soon as Kaya left the room, Roy snatched his hand away from Felicity as if she had scalded him. She rolled her eyes.

“I get it. You’re not that into me.”

Roy cast a hunted look around the small room.

“He’s not watching us, you know.” Felicity sat on the floor and began to peel off her sopping clothes, layer by layer. Roy turned away while she was still on unbuttoning her parka. “Good call,” she said dryly. “I wouldn’t want you to catch a glimpse of the long underwear. You might lose control entirely.”

Roy ignored this. “Who’s not watching us?”

“Oliver. That’s who you keep looking for, right? Like he’s going to jump out and break your arm for touching me?” Felicity yanked her boots off with slightly more force than necessary. “Even Oliver can’t walk through walls.” She actually wouldn’t put money on that, but she went on anyway. “And this was basically his own stupid idea. Anyway, if Oliver was so damn interested in who’s touching me, he could… well, make a strong case for why other men shouldn’t touch me. He hasn’t. Touch away.”

Roy sat down with his back to her, his arms wrapped around his legs. She couldn’t see his face, but she could feel him thinking. “What?”

“Nothing. Just... Oliver pulled me aside before we got in here, and asked me to …. commit to this whole fake relationship thing. Like, really commit.”

“Oliver asked you to commit? That’s rich.” Felicity quirked her mouth as though she had tasted something sour.

“Seriously, Felicity. I want to make sure you’re OK with this. Things could get…. weird.”

“Thanks for the heads up.” Felicity peeled off the last of her layers and slipped below the surface. The water was slightly too hot, scalding her skin for a moment, then seeming to penetrate beneath the skin to ease the aches and tension in all of her muscles. “I mean, we’re sharing a magical underground hot tub, but I’d hate to think that things could get weird.” She sighed. It was hard to stay irritable in the soothing warmth. “Roy, he asked you to commit, and you’re committing. What’s the problem?”

Roy came and sat down on the rim of the pool, keeping his eyes averted. “The problem is that every time I touch you he looks like he’s going to kick my ass. And we both know he could.” He started to remove his own boots.

“What are you doing?” Felicity looked up at him, alarmed.

“What? I was going to put my feet in. I’m cold.”

Felicity wrinkled her nose. “You were going to put your stinky feet into my bath water? While I’m in here?”

“Your stinky feet are in there with you,” Roy pointed out.

“My feet,” Felicity said coldly, “are not stinky.”  

“I’ve shared a tent with you. Your feet are not not stinky.”

She slapped some water at him, but it was half-hearted. “Well if you’re going to stick your feet in, just get in all the way. I promise not to look at it - I mean, anything.” Felicity bit her tongue so hard she drew blood. “Anything interesting, I mean. Wait - not that it’s - that I -.”

“Felicity, shut up,” Roy said evenly. He looked doubtfully  at the water, which was cloudy with minerals, almost opaque.

“What are you more scared of?” Felicity asked reasonably. “Oliver or hypothermia?”

Roy didn’t move.

Felicity sighed. She would have liked to linger in the bath, but Roy was shivering. “Hand me a robe,” she said. “It’s your turn.”

 

********************

“We were dying,” said Kaya. “That might sound melodramatic, but it was true.”

It was early the next morning, and she and Felicity were preparing cell growth solution at the long table in the training room. They were moving slowly, since Kaya had made it clear that her first priority was to have cover to talk privately.

Felicity looked around the spacious room - at the shelves, laden alternately with obscure antique objects and cutting edge technology, at the scholars buried in books as old, or older, as the one that she had looked at the day before, and at sparsely equipped training mat and equipment. No bars for salmon runs - Felicity had been somewhat disappointed to note - punching bags, or free weights. Just some worn chalk lines to mark the borders of the fighting arena and a collection of weapons ranging from staffs to swords to knives of every description. Roy was currently sparring with Oliver. They were using staffs, and it was clear that Roy was rusty. His frustration was apparent, but Oliver wasn’t holding back.

Felicity remembered what Thea had said about punching bags. She would have fit in well - N’sal would have loved her. Or identified her immediately as a rival and single-mindedly pursued her downfall, which Felicity suspected might be the closest setting to “friendship” that N’sal had.

Suddenly, Felicity wished with all of her heart that it was Thea who was here, instead of her. Thea would belong in this strange, sparse place where “warrior” was a valid career path. Roy and Oliver belonged, too - they were born for this setting. But Felicity felt out of place in the mine. She couldn’t fight on the same level as any of them, and she didn’t have her computer or any of her equipment that to her were as vital as Oliver’s bow was to him. Yes, she could think without it - as he could fight without his bow - but she was so much more powerful, and so much more herself, with it.

She had been so focused for so long, first on finding Oliver and then on survival, that she had thought that it would be a relief to be able to rest, to catch her breath and stay in one place, knowing that it was at least temporarily safe. Instead, she felt adrift and uneasy. And - yes - homesick; desperately homesick.

Aware that Felicity had stopped listening, Kaya trailed off. “Oh god, I’m sorry,” Felicity burst out, when she realized that they were sitting in silence. “I guess I was…” She wasn’t sure how to finish the sentence without being rude. “Not listening,” she admitted, giving up.

Then she looked into the other woman’s soft brown eyes and, without being aware of it, relaxed a bit. Kaya followed her gaze to the training mat. Oliver, the bands of muscle on his back gleaming with sweat, was offering Roy a hand up after sweeping his legs out from under him. Roy declined the assistance, and Oliver grinned. Both men seemed to be having a great time. Felicity could have killed them.

Kaya tried to hide a smile as she handed Felicity a pipette and they began working again. “Man trouble?” The phrase sounded awkward and stilted coming from her, as though she had heard it somewhere and was trying it out for the first time.

“You have no idea,” said Felicity, honestly.

Kaya watched Roy thoughtfully. “He seems nice. And he’s very handsome.”

“Yes,” said Felicity, concentrating on her measurements.

“But I was surprised to find out that you were together.”

Felicity’s hand jerked and spilled a few drops of distilled water. “Oh?”

“He’s very… quiet.” Kaya sounded like she had chosen a word that she didn’t mean, because the word that she did mean might get taken the wrong way. “And you’re…”

“Loud? A talker? Garrulous?”

“A leader.” Kaya’s eyes probed Felicity’s face, and then she nodded sharply in the direction of Oliver. “More like him.”

Felicity laughed. “You think I’m like Oliver?” She shook her head, amused at Kaya’s total misreading of her. “Look, I’m good at what I do. And what I do is make what they," nodding towards the mat, "do, possible.” She shrugged, good naturedly. “I don’t want to lead anyone. That kind of responsibility wears people down.”

Kaya didn’t argue. In the silence that she let linger, Felicity thought about what she had pieced together about who Oliver was before the island. She wondered what that boy would have said if someone had told him that he would turn into the warrior in front of her. Laugh, probably. As she just had.

But still. She wasn’t like Oliver. She didn’t want to be. For one thing, she had no interest in sacrificing her own life, or even her own happiness, for any mission, no matter how noble.

Suddenly she desperately wanted to change the subject. “I didn’t mean to interrupt you. Let’s go back to the story about you dying.” She heard herself and bit her lips. “I mean - the story that you were telling.”

Kaya smiled. “We were dying. We were losing our culture, but more than that, we were losing our population. Many, many of our children had been stolen by missionaries and the government to be raised in White homes. My mother was one of the few who returned, but many more were missing, and we had no way of recovering them. Felicity, how old do you think I am?”

It was a sudden shift, and it startled Felicity. She looked into Kaya’s unlined face and old eyes. “This is a trick question, isn’t it?”

Kaya’s smile widened. “Yes. This is a trick question.”

Kaya looked only slightly older than Felicity’s own 26 years, but Felicity remembered what Tommy and Oliver had said about the miraculous properties of the algae. “I don’t know…” she said carefully. “How old were you when you stopped aging?”

“Very good,” said Kaya. “You get partial credit. In fact, I didn’t stop aging. I have been consuming the algae since I was born, and it greatly slows, but does not stop, the aging process. I am over 150 years old. My mother is well over 200. She has aged much more than she would have if she had been raised on the algae, as I was, but her young adulthood was spent with White missionaries.”

Though Felicity had expected a shocking number, she couldn’t help but be shocked all the same. Standing before her was a woman who had been born prior to the American Civil War. Chills ran down her back.

“I needed to tell you my age in order for you to understand this story. I was a young woman when World War II broke out. We knew very little about it, isolated as we were, but what we heard was terrifying. After the devastation of the first World War, we thought that the world had been horrified into keeping peace.” Kaya looked at Felicity and for once the latter wasn’t comforted by her soft brown eyes. She couldn’t help but be chilled by what those eyes had seen. Kaya went on.

“To you, both World Wars are historical facts, neatly bookended by long-past invasions, assassinations and treaties. To us, it felt as if the world itself was catching fire around us. It didn’t seem that even we, in our arctic isolation, would be safe.

“This was before we were driven underground, and we used to send scouts almost daily to the nearest outposts so that we had constant, if outdated, news of the war. So we knew that there were rumors of a weapon far more terrible than any that the world had ever seen. And this weapon was purported to be in the hands of the United States.”

Kaya looked so miserable at the recollection that Felicity wanted to reach out and touch her arm to draw her back to the present, and remind her that the terror and the suffering that she was remembering was long over. But it didn’t seem to be over for Kaya.

“Try to understand. We had heard about the German invasions, but rumors of the concentration camps had not reached us, so far away, and we knew nothing of the horrors perpetrated by the Japanese in China. We had no allegiance to Axis or Allies, but we feared the terrible weapon in anyone’s hands. So when the Japanese government approached us…”

Felicity felt her pulse pick up. She suddenly knew where this story was heading - to a wrecked Japanese sub, washed up on the shore of a conflict-ridden island in the North China Sea.

“Oh, God,” she whispered.

“They offered us money. A tremendous amount of money, if we could formulate a version of the algae that would not only stay viable for long periods of time, but would magnify the healing properties. To create super-strength, super-healing, super-speed.”

“Super-soldiers,” said Felicity, flatly. “And you took the money.” She couldn’t help but feel disappointed that Kaya had made such a mercenary decision.

Kaya spread her hands flat, facing upwards. “I made a choice to save my people. Missionaries and the White government had driven us nearly to extinction. With the money offered us by the Japanese, I could track down the survivors who had been kidnapped and help them return. I could preserve artifacts, preserve knowledge. I could bribe the necessary officials to stop the policies that were still taking our children away from us. I could help us survive.” She looked steadily into Felicity’s eyes, not flinching away from the choice she had made. “So I did.”

“And you created Mirakuru.” Felicity thought of Roy’s agony after killing a man under its influence. She thought of Slade and the terror he had inflicted on them. She thought of Oliver weeping by his dead mother's side; of Roy and the burden of guilt that he carried; of Anna, and all of the others who had been lost in last year's terror.

“That’s what they called it, yes. I warned them that it wasn’t stable, but - “

“But you let them have it anyway.”

“What choice did I have?” Kaya snapped, finally losing her calm in the face of Felicity’s anger. “I knew what it did, but I had already taken the money. They took the Mirakuru. They didn’t give me a choice.”

“Why are you telling me this?” Felicity suddenly felt tired. She didn’t want to know anymore. Mirakuru had wrecked a lot of lives, but it was gone now, except for the small sample that she had distilled from Roy’s blood to study. What was the point of learning that Kaya, the one person with whom she felt at home here, was to blame for it all?

Kaya glanced behind her and to either side with a hunted look. Felicity could have told her that she was only drawing suspicion to them by being so cagey, but she let it pass.

“Because,” said Kaya, her voice an urgent whisper. “It’s happening again. I received a message a few months ago that someone wants to pay me a lot of money to formulate a stable version of the algae. I didn’t respond, and I think he’s been sending people up here to search for me. At first I thought that your friend Oliver might work for him. He lives in Starling City, too.”

“Who?” But Felicity already knew what the answer would be. Her heart sank as she looked again at where Roy and Oliver were now taking a break. As Roy took a swig of water, Oliver said something to him, grinning, and Roy burst out laughing, spraying the water across the mat.

She would need to tell them, she thought, sadly. Suddenly, their pleasure in finding each other again, which had so annoyed her just a few minutes ago, seemed something precious and fragile. She wanted, more than anything, to protect it. How could she tell them that the man who had orchestrated their presence here - the man who couldn’t seem to leave them alone, the man to whom love would always be either a weakness or a weapon-- was on the hunt for the substance that had almost destroyed them all?

“Who?” She repeated, desperately wishing the answer to be anything other than what she knew it to be.

Kaya’s voice dropped even lower, as if the name were enough to summon the man himself.

“Malcolm Merlyn.”

 

********************

 

“So the store owner remembered this guy?” Digg looked skeptical.

“He remembered the order, not the guy - girl. Woman.” Ray waved the receipt. “But he keeps everything. In hard copy. The place is a fire trap, but it’s lucky for us that he does.”

“So? Who are we looking up?” Digg powered up Ray’s laptop and, after a moment’s hesitation, opened Google.

“Why don’t you let me do it?” asked Ray, tactfully moving Digg aside. With a few keystrokes, he established a link to the Starling City PD database and entered the name - Lydia Bainbridge. At least there were some basic hacks that he didn’t need Felicity for, he mused.

As usual when he thought of Felicity, his stomach gave a lurch. He had tried to stop keeping track of how long it had been since he’d heard from her, but some corner of his brain was maintaining a running tally. Five weeks. There was no good reason for her to have been gone that long, but there were a lot of bad ones.

He was furious with himself for giving her the scrap of paper with the coordinates, and even more furious with Oliver for leaving it behind. Until recently, he hadn’t known the man as anything other than the selfish, apathetic CEO from whom he had salvaged a dying company. As far as Ray was concerned, when people’s jobs were depending on you, those were pretty unforgivable qualities to have. Finding out that Oliver had been anything but apathetic had somewhat changed Ray’s opinion, but now he thought about the choice that Oliver had made to leave that scrap of paper behind - and that it had been a choice, Ray had no doubt - and suddenly selfish was back on the table. A man like Oliver wouldn’t leave evidence unless he intended to. It had been tantamount to leaving a note with instructions to come looking for him, and what kind of man does that to the woman who loves him? First going off to get himself killed, and then giving her an invitation to do the same.  Ray clenched his jaw, wishing that Oliver were still alive so that he could kill him.

The computer beeped, signaling that it had found a match, and Ray jumped. Digg gave him an odd look. “You OK?”

“Yeah. Just… thinking about something else.” Ray was already typing the address on the screen into his phone’s GPS. “It’s less than ten minutes away from here.”

“Hold up.” Digg had taken control of the laptop and was scrolling down the screen, skimming the information. Born in Glades Memorial Hospital in 1980, graduated from Starling Central High in 1998…. Digg stopped scrolling as he came to the final piece of information.

Deceased, November 19, 2013.


	17. Chapter 17

Felicity crouched at the edge of the mat and watched Roy and Oliver. She needed some time away from Kaya to think, and she needed to talk to the others about whether this new information affected their priorities.

The men had been training for hours and neither showed any signs of flagging. Oliver had long since taken off his shirt, and his shoulders and back were gleaming with sweat in the bright torchlight. She tried to call up her annoyance with him. He's indecisive, she reminded herself, as he delivered a nasty blow to Ray's ribs. Weak, she thought firmly, as he took the other man down with a powerful kick. Distant, reserved. She swallowed. Hard to love. Hard to be with... her eyes followed him on the mat. Hard. Rock-hard.... This wasn't helping.

He looked up and spotted her. Seeming to forget for a moment that they weren't alone, he flashed her a daredevil grin. “Want a turn?”

Felicity's first instinct was to say no, that she needed to speak with him about something important, but the grin was a glimpse into the open, hopeful Oliver who had let himself take her on that date, who had told her he loved her. The one who showed up, sometimes, when he was sparring with Roy or confiding in Digg. The Oliver who was irresistible. Damn. She slipped out of the clean robe and shift that Kaya had lent her, leaving only her own sleeveless camisole over the soft suede leggings that had also come from Kaya, and stepped out of her boots. Barefoot, she stepped onto the stretched skins that the Kawani used as a training mat.

Oliver's eyes lingered on her bare arms, and then traveled down and back up the rest of her body. She shivered in the warm room. She took one slow step towards him, and then another, and his lips parted as his breath began to come more quickly.

Her first blow took him by surprise, but he immediately recovered and blocked her next hit, grabbing her wrist and spinning her around so that he was holding her from behind, his stubble rough on her ear and neck, his breath warm on her cheek as he bent down to whisper to her.

“Sneaky, Smoak.” The soft growl sent pleasant vibrations down her spine, and she lingered for a moment before pulling away. Instead of releasing her, he spun her out and pulled her back in, as if they were dancing. Now they were face to face, and the grin was back. “Try it again. See what happens.”

She did. What happened was that he used the momentum of her upper body, as she aimed an upper-cut at him, to sweep her legs out from under her and send her tumbling to the mat. She'd gone down like that many times when training – one of her weaknesses, according to Digg, was that she got so focused on one aspect of her attack that she left herself wide open to being caught off guard. But his time, instead of hitting the ground, she found herself suspended inches away from it. Oliver, after sweeping her legs, had completed his own spin in a direction that brought him back to her side in order to catch her. She realized, with some surprise, that he was now holding her, face to face, in a deep dip. Were they dancing?

Roy, watching from the sidelines, snorted. “Why don't you do that when you knock my ass down?”

“If your ass was this cute, maybe I would,” Oliver muttered, his deep voice creating pleasant vibrations against Felicity’s chest.

Felicity's head was spinning, but she arched over further, placed her hands behind her head, and did a back walkover out of his arms before sending a spin-kick in Oliver's direction. It connected, but he caught the foot and flipped her over, again ready to catch her before she went down – this time, though, she was prepared, and adapted her attack to take advantage of his solicitude. She righted herself, pretended to stumble, and when he stepped closer and reached out for her, she pivoted the force of her entire upper body into one wicked blow to his midsection. She heard the breath go out of him in a gasp, and stepped back to admire her work – only then seeing that his eyes were bulging and his mouth was gaping.

“Oh my god, I'm so sorry, your wound -” she didn't get a chance to finish the sentence. His face relaxed, and the realization that he had been faking came a split second too late. She had left her own midsection open, and he directed a kick at it that she knew he held back, but which nonetheless sent her sprawling. This time, he let her hit the ground, but he dropped down at almost the same moment, covering her body with his in a pose that both ensured his victory by keeping her from regaining her footing, and brought his mouth back against her ear.

“I should have taught you to fight a long time again,” he said, in the same gravelly whisper that he had used before. “Just think of all the practice we’ve missed.” She was lying face down, and he was lying lengthwise on top of her, bracing himself on his elbows but allowing enough of his weight to rest on her that she could feel every square inch of his body on hers. She wriggled half-heartedly, not really wanting to get away from him.

“Watch it,” he whispered. “If you keep doing that, we might have kind of a hard time hiding how I feel about you.”

Roy cleared his throat from the sidelines, and spoke loudly for the sake of any onlookers.

“Want to get off of my girl?”

His voice seemed dampen Oliver’s mood.

“No,” Oliver muttered, but rolled over anyway. He lay on his back for a moment, staring up at the ceiling, while Felicity sat up. He watched as she pulled layers of clothing back on, her sweat rapidly chilling her. She could almost feel him remembering himself and all of his resolutions - whatever they happened to be today. To stay away from her, not to make promises he couldn’t keep, to protect her from Katherine and from himself and from whatever evil force he had currently selected as the reason they couldn’t be together. All of his goddamned nobility and duty and self-sacrifice: nothing more than stones in the wall that he was building between them.

“Sorry,” he said stiffly, sitting up himself. “I got carried away.”

She turned away, not wanting to watch his face as he carefully rebuilt his mask of indifference. “Yeah,” she said sadly, as the warmth of him faded and goosebumps rose on her arms. “You did.”

They had been speaking softly. Now Roy approached. “You guys OK?” He asked uncertainly, sensing the shift in the atmosphere.

Felicity stood up, ignoring the hand that Oliver had offered her, averting her face so that he wouldn’t see her eyes. She couldn’t bear to show him, once more, how badly he was hurting her.

“Fine,” she said, smiling reassuringly at Roy. “But listen - I have something to tell you guys.” She looked around, realizing that she was doing the same thing for which she had silently criticized Kaya earlier. “We might as well talk here. It will just look suspicious if we go off by ourselves.”

Oliver started to stand up. “I’ll go get Tommy.”

“Wait -” She put out a hand, but stopped short before she touched him. She knew that Oliver trusted Tommy, but she had really only known him for a few weeks, and they were talking about his father. Who knew, when push came to shove, where his loyalties would lie? “Let me tell you first. If you still think it’s a good idea, we’ll tell Tommy afterwards.” Oliver narrowed his eyes at the idea of leaving Tommy out, but Roy nodded in agreement. He, like Felicity, didn’t yet trust Tommy with the bone-deep faith that he felt for the others.

She and Roy sat on the mat and Oliver squatted down in front of them, as she filled them in on what Kaya had told her.

There was a long silence, which Oliver finally broke, his voice more thoughtful and less hostile than Felicity would have expected. “So. Kaya invented Mirakuru.” He directed his gaze at the floor so that his eyes were hooded, giving no clue to how he felt.

“Sort of without meaning to.” Felicity wasn’t sure why she was defending the woman, but a part of her sympathized with the choice that Kaya had made. If she had been forced to choose between the well-being of the world and that of her people - Oliver, Digg and Roy - wouldn’t she have done the same?

Oliver stared into the distance, as though he was watching the future unfurl. “It doesn’t change anything.”

“What?” Felicity didn’t understand how he could be so calm. Her skin was crawling at the thought of Merlyn pursuing the powerful substance.

Oliver nodded decisively to himself, as though he had settled an argument. Felicity gritted her teeth - it would have been nice if he had let them in on the discussion.

“We focus on what’s in front of us - Ra’s al Ghul. We’ll deal with Merlyn as soon as we’re back in Starling.”

“Nope.” Felicity’s voice was firm. He looked up at her in surprise. “As soon as we’re back in Starling, I’m taking a bath. Like, a real one. Not a magical underground algae one.”

Oliver smiled reluctantly. “OK. Almost as soon as we’re back in Starling. We won’t let Merlyn get his hands on Mirakuru.” He looked at Felicity. “I promise.”

“So when we’re done with Ra’s al Ghul, we have to take on Malcolm Merlyn?” Roy dragged his hand across his face, wearily. “Anyone else we should know about? Is Slade Wilson planning a comeback?”

 

********************

 

“I just don’t understand what Slade Wilson has to do with any of it,” Digg mused stared at the address on the screen. “I mean, there doesn’t seem to be any connection between him and this woman. All we know is that this woman bought the glasses straps that we think belonged to the man who killed Anna. Who was under the effect of Mirakuru at the time. Who then may have given Connor the device….”

“Definitely gave Connor the device,” Ray insisted.

“OK, let’s say he did. Why? To get him sent to the island to locate Slade? And then what?” Digg shook his head in frustration. “It doesn’t make sense, man.”

“It doesn’t have to.” Ray’s voice was full of quiet conviction. “We just need to keep following the trail. We’ll figure it out, Digg. We will.” He looked at Digg, earnestly. “Look, I’m not losing it. I haven’t flown off the handle so far, have I? And I’m not going to. We’ll just keep going until we figure it out.”

“And then what?” Digg’s voice was equally quiet. “What’s the end-game here, Roy? We turn him into the cops and say that he murdered Anna under the effects of Mirakuru? Look, the only prosecution they’ve brought for that night was against Slade Wilson. His soldiers…no one knows what happened to them. They were cured, and they went back to their lives.”

“And that’s OK by you? After the destruction they caused? The lives that were lost?” Ray was staring at the screen as though it owed him an answer.

“I don’t know.” Digg hesitated. It wasn’t his secret to tell, but he knew in his gut that Ray was going to kill the man if they found him. Anything that forced him to think twice… “Roy was infected with Mirakuru.”

Ray froze. “What? He was one of the… one of them?” His face darkened.

“Not that night. We had him under control by then - sedated. But he was infected before then.  That’s when Oliver started training him, trying to help him control it.”

“Of course.” _Of course Oliver Queen would have the conceit to believe that he could control a substance that turned men into monsters._

Digg didn’t ask what he meant. “He tried. Roy, I mean. But… it drove him crazy. Really, truly, crazy. Like nothing I’ve ever seen.” He wished that he didn’t have to say it. “In the end he totally lost it. There was nothing of him left. He killed a cop, Ray.”

Ray’s jaw worked. Digg wasn’t sure what he was thinking. He went on, “I know I’m asking a lot of you. I’m not saying I could do it if it were Lyla. But if this guy is responsible for Anna, then Roy is responsible for that cop.”

“Maybe he is.” Roy’s voice was hard, but Digg thought that he heard it waver.

“Maybe he is,” Digg agreed. “He thinks he is. He hasn’t forgiven himself, I know that much. But… I guess I don’t believe that it was him. I’ve seen him go up against a lot of people - the scum of the earth - and he’s never hurt them more than he had to. So why would he kill an innocent man?” Digg shook his head. “I don’t think he did. I think the Mirakuru did. I think it used Roy, the way it used the man who killed Anna.”

The computer reverted to a screensaver, casting Ray’s face into shadow.

“We’ll follow the trail,” he said again, as if it was the only thing he knew for sure. “We’ll follow it until it ends. And then…” He met Digg’s gaze for the first time, and there was agony in his eyes. “And then it will end, Digg. One way or another. It will be over.”

Digg wondered what he would do if Ray went after the man. Oliver’s rules… but Oliver was gone, and Ray was here. If it came down to a choice between a man that Digg didn’t know, and a man who had become the closest thing he had to a friend in Starling…

He thought about all of the lives he had taken over the course of his own life. Had they all been evil, or even unarguably guilty? If he had to answer for every life, would he be able to, with a clean conscience?

Maybe not. But Ray still could, Digg realized. He didn’t just have an obligation to save the life of this stranger in the glasses. He had an obligation to save Ray’s life. He thought of all the times he had told Oliver hard truths, and even walked away when he had to. He didn’t know how much, or even if, it had mattered, but he knew that in the end, when Oliver went off to fight Ra’s al Ghul, he was a man - not a monster. What might Ray become if Digg let him do this?

“We’ll follow the trail,” he finally agreed, after a long silence. “And I’ll have your back.” His voice rang with the truth of the statement. What he didn’t say was that he didn’t know - couldn’t yet know - what that would mean when Ray was staring down the barrel of his personal demons.

********************

 

They had started joining the Kawani on their nighttime patrols. They had all agreed that it was a good idea to increase their stamina and help them get to know the area, but Oliver knew that Roy and Felicity would have done almost anything to get out of the mine for a few hours. This way, they could see the open sky once every few nights, and they wouldn’t be tempted to bolt.

Oliver had drawn N’sal as a patrol partner. They had been walking in silence for an hour, through a landscape that was finally being transformed by spring. Sleepy chirps drifted down from the trees as they passed, and the ground underfoot - no longer covered by snow - was springy and wet. In the tunnels underground, everything was the same as it always had been, while the earth above began to soften and blush with color. Oliver preferred the tunnels - the blunt, warm wind above reminded him of the change that was coming, the battle that, if they survived it, would force some of them to make choices they weren’t ready for.

The light of the waxing moon made him feel jumpy and exposed. Their attack on Ra’s was scheduled to take place in three days, and anything going wrong at this point - like being spotted by the League with a member of the Kawani - could jeopardize the plan.

N’sal’s voice startled him out of his thoughts. She spoke softly. “There!” She pointed with her bow towards the horizon. “Sagittarius is back.” She smiled triumphantly at Oliver. “Orion has fallen. Time for another warrior to guard the sky.”

“Orion isn’t a guardian.” Oliver said absently, scanning the trees around them.

“No. He was sent to the sky as punishment for his hubris. Sagittarius was placed there in honor. Sagittarius watches over us. Orion is on the run, and watches out only for himself.”

Oliver turned to her. “You’re afraid I’m going to run when the moment comes?”

She shrugged carelessly, as if they were discussing the possibility of rain. “I think it’s possible that you won’t.”

“That’s something, I guess.” N’sal had been softening towards him lately - towards all of them. She was less critical, less guarded. She seemed to be growing happier and more hopeful every day that approached the battle. Oliver, on the other hand, could feel himself growing more tense and irritable. He had been spending his time training, waiting, and avoiding Felicity - timing the routines of his day so that he wouldn’t run into her, trying not to watch her as he sparred and she worked with Kaya on the algae. He kept imagining that he could feel her eyes on him, but when he looked up she would be peering into a microscope or a petri dish, her blond hair cascading down like a curtain between them. He didn’t know what he was going to do when they got back to Starling City, but he didn’t think that he could keep this up - working alongside her, trying to keep his feelings locked down. No matter how much of a distraction she might be if they were together, nothing could be worse than the agony of having her so close and still so far away.

The sharp blade of a knife kissed his throat, and N’sal’s breath was warm against his ear. “Get your head in the game, Queen.”  

He jerked away from her and she sheathed her knife while he glared. “You don’t really get ‘on the same side,’ do you?”

She shrugged. “If I had been League, you would have been dead. What were you thinking about?”

Oliver cocked an eyebrow. “Really? We’re sharing feelings now?”

She rolled her eyes. “God, I hope not. But if it’s splitting your focus, it’s my business.” His face shuttered closed and he turned away. Her own face softened with the dawn of understanding. “Oh. Felicity.”

His heart leapt into his throat, but he forced his voice to stay calm. “Why would you say that?”

She looked at him in honest puzzlement. “Isn’t that it? Look, I didn’t know why you wanted to pretend that it wasn’t her - why you wouldn’t admit that you’re together. But I figured that you had a right to your secrets.” She shrugged. “Until your secrets start making you weak.”

“Felicity doesn’t make me weak.” Oliver said it, even though he wasn’t sure it was true. “And she’s with Roy. She’s not - I don’t….” He trailed off under N’als’s steady gaze. “Does everyone know?”

“No. Only me. I’ve seen you in battle together. You try to control it, but your first instinct is always to protect her. You can’t hide your feelings for someone when you’re fighting alongside them. And once you see it, it’s obvious. You two spend half of your time staring at each other and sighing. I’m kind of surprised no one else has noticed, but they haven’t.”

“Not even your mother?” Oliver tried not to show how important the question was to him, but fear had lodged in every muscle.

“No.” She saw him relax, slightly, and said, “Oh. Is that it? Did she - what, threaten? Imply that your loved ones weren’t safe?” Oliver’s silence was enough of an answer for her. “My mother is very old, Oliver. She knows what makes people work - and she knows how to make them work for her. I won’t tell her about Felicity if you don’t want me to, but you don’t need to be afraid. She won’t hurt her - not really.”

Oliver remembered the cold look in Katherine’s eyes, and wondered whether he or N’sal was mistaken about what she was capable of. “I believed her. Believe her.”

“Of course you do. She wanted you to believe her.” N’sal spoke gently, which sounded strange coming from her. “In order for the arrow to fly, the bow needs to be drawn. My mother knows how to draw the bow.”

Oliver tried not to show his annoyance at being compared to a weapon. Maybe Katherine had manipulated him - or maybe N’sal, with her newfound gentleness and concern for his personal life, was manipulating him now. “Anyway, don’t read too much into it, OK? Felicity and I really aren’t together.”

N’sal nodded, as if the final piece of the puzzle had fallen into place. “So that’s what the sighing is about.” Her old edge returned to her voice as she said, disparagingly, “That’s stupid.”

“Thanks.” Oliver relaxed, now that N’sal was behaving like herself again. “I’ll be sure get your advice before I make dating decisions from now on.”

“It could only help.” N’sal’s pace picked up, and Oliver lengthened his own stride to keep up with her, glad to focus on physical exertion. “It doesn’t look like you make very good decisions without my advice. Oliver, you could die in three days. You could die now, if you don’t stop mooning and start paying attention. What on earth are you doing wasting your time? Not everyone gets the chance to be with the person they love.” It was such an absurdly sentimental notion coming from N’sal that Oliver almost laughed. Then he saw the naked pain on her face and he remembered.

“Like you and Tommy.” He wasn’t sure what made him say it - maybe he just wanted to shine the spotlight to someone else’s heart for a while.

She looked like she was deciding whether or not to be angry with him for the comment, but when she spoke, her voice was soft and slightly tired. “Like me and Tommy.”

He was surprised at her honesty. “What will you do if he leaves?” He tried not to think about what he was really asking - how would she survive if she lost Tommy? How would he survive if he lost Felicity? He shivered in the warm night air.

She looked puzzled. “What do you mean?”

He spoke gently, surprised that she hadn’t considered it. “If we defeat Ra’s al Ghul. What if he decides not to stay? He had a life in Starling City. He might...”

She shook her head impatiently. “No, I mean, what do you mean ‘if’? Of course he will leave.”

Oliver was too surprised to respond, and she went on. “He’ll go home to Laurel. There is no choice. He will leave.” She smiled at the expression on Oliver’s face. He had noticed that, in serious moments, she spoke like her mother - in a stately, measured tone, her low voice sounding as if it could have come from a previous century. “I think perhaps that you have misunderstood. I love Tommy, yes. And yes; he makes me happy. But he does not make me whole. This - “ she spread her arms to encompass the landscape around her, mines below and sky above, “ - is what makes me whole. When Tommy goes home to Laurel, I will miss him. And I will still be whole.”  

N’sal drew ahead of Oliver, who still wasn’t sure what to say. “Despite what you say, you’re worried that Felicity does weaken you. And she does - as long as you spend yourself focusing on the reasons that you can’t be together. That is what drains your energy, and what distracts you. You think that she will soften you; that if you let yourself be happy, you will lose the edge that you need to survive.” Oliver was unsettled by how deep N’sal’s perception went. What else had she learned about him, watching from shadows? She had been looking at the sky as though the stars had been showing her something important, but now she turned back to Oliver, and her eyes were bright and sharp. “But how hard do you think I would have fought, if I weren’t fighting for what I loved? If the land was gone, if my people were gone, how soon do you think I would lay down my bow?”

She turned away and began walking back towards the mine. In the east, the sky was beginning to lighten. “You believe that love makes you weak. You are wrong. It’s your fear of love that makes you weak.” This time, what should have sounded falsely sentimental in N’sal’s mouth rang with a truth that cut Oliver to his core. She smiled at him, softening her words, and he suddenly wondered if he knew her at all. “That’s the difference between you and me. What you need to become whole is right there in front of you, sighing into a microscope. And you refuse it. That is what makes you weak. And a fool, and a coward. That is what keeps you on the run.”

She looked to the brightening sky, and Oliver, knowing what she was thinking, followed her gaze to where, six months from now, Orion would emerge once more above the horizon and begin again his long, wearying race with the scorpion.


	18. Chapter 18

Felicity was so absorbed in her work that she didn’t notice that N’sal had left the training mat and approached her until the other woman spoke. She and Kaya had picked up their pace as the day of the battle had approached, and now, on the day before it was scheduled to take place, they were working around the clock and sleeping in shifts.

“What are you working on?” N’sal’s voice was casual, even friendly. Felicity darted a look of suspicion at her.

“Why?”

N’sal smiled wryly. “Because you’re so absorbed in it that you didn’t even notice when Oliver took off his shirt a few minutes ago. You don’t usually miss that.”

Felicity darted a look towards the training mat. Sure enough, Oliver, recently returned from a patrol with N’sal, had stripped to the waist for a bout with Roy. Her cheeks flooded with fire.

“I don’t… it’s not…” she mumbled, bending over the microscope again so that a curtain of hair hid her face from N’sal’s amused gaze.

N’sal laughed, a brief, startlingly clear sound. “Don’t worry about it. Nothing wrong with enjoying the view. It just made me curious about what’s absorbing your attention.”

Flustered, Felicity pushed her sleeves up and, without thinking, began to twist the cuff around her arm. It had become a habit over the past few days. She liked the smooth feel of it, and she was hesitant to admit even to herself how comforting she found the idea that it might, like the old man said, be a map of some kind - that someone, somewhere, knew the answer to how tomorrow was going to turn out.

She had intended to turn the bracelet over to Kaya, figuring that it belonged in Kawani hands, but as the days wore on she became more and more reluctant to give it up. In rare solitary moments, she pulled it off of her arm and turned it around in her hands, seeking the answer that the old man had said was there.

Now, N’sal’s eyes flew to it. “Where did you get that?”

Shit. Felicity had been lying to herself, pretending that she was planning to give the cuff to Kaya any day, that it was just coincidence that she wore it high up on her arm where no one else could see it. But now, resisting the impulse to yank her sleeve down to hide it again, she had to acknowledge the truth - she had been purposely shielding it from view out of fear that it would be taken from her before she had solved the puzzle.

Now, sadly, she removed it and handed it to N’sal. “I’ve been meaning to give it to you, actually. Or Kaya. An old man gave it to me - it was his mother’s. He said she was Kawani.”

“Rocky?”

Of course. Of _course_ N’sal, warrior-princess of a lost civilization living in secrecy a mile below the earth, knew Rocky.

N’sal shrugged. “Keep it. I have my own.”

“What?”

“Every woman is given one when she comes of age, to signify her eligibility for leadership. It shows the history of the Kawani on the outside and something else on the inside - something private, about the woman’s family or future. That one belonged to my aunt.”

“ _What?_ ” Suddenly Felicity remembered - the scowling woman in the wedding photos. She realized why Katherine had looked familiar to her when they first met - she had chalked it up to family resemblance to N’sal at the time.  

“My aunt left the Kawani. Unlike my mother, she didn’t come home when she had the chance - she married a White man, had a White baby, lived a White life. Rocky is my cousin. I met him once, a long time ago, when he was a child.” Her face softened at the memory, and then she handed the bracelet back to Felicity. “It was his to give. Besides - they’re not really meant to be kept by others. They’re not relics. They’re… living objects. They guide a woman through her life.”

“So what do I do with it?”

Again, N’sal shrugged. “Maybe it finished guiding my aunt and is looking for someone new. Maybe it was supposed to find you all along. What’s on the inside?” Without waiting for a response, N’sal took the bracelet and flipped it. “Oh.” She looked at Oliver, then back to Felicity, and grinned. “Orion. It was _definitely_ supposed to find its way to you.”

Felicity blushed again, though she wasn’t entirely sure why. “Rocky said it tells the end of the story.”

N’sal frowned, and looked at it again. “Beats me. I guess we’ll find out when the story ends.” She looked back towards the microscope as Felicity returned the cuff to her arm. “So? Are you going to tell me what you’re working on?”

Felicity didn’t know what to make of N’sal’s suddenly friendly interest in her and her work. Her initial, barely restrained hostility had faded to a vague disdain, which had finally evolved into ignoring Felicity altogether. Felicity didn’t mind - she never felt comfortable around N’sal, with her tightly reined energy and the sense that, just below the surface, was a river of rage perpetually threatening to flood the banks of the woman’s self-control.

But lately, Felicity had to admit, N’sal had seemed to be… lightening up. As the battle approached and the rest of them became increasingly grim, focused on the task ahead, N’sal was clearly looking forward to it, becoming brighter and more energetic as the day approached. She also was warmer, somehow - less intimidating. Felicity gave in.

“We’re close - Kaya and I - to replicating and stabilizing the active agent in the algae. She’s been able to replicate it before, but it’s always degraded quickly.” Felicity didn’t know whether N’sal knew about Mirakuru. “Its instability made it dangerous. We identified a companion cell that’s present when the algae is living and not when it’s dead - it seems to be some kind of symbiotic bacteria.” N’sal’s face was beginning to glaze over with a vacancy that Felicity found annoyingly familiar. Why couldn’t people ever pay attention? She rushed on. “We’re running trials now with metabolic bi-products of the algae -”  N’sal’s gaze drifted; _metabolic bi-products_ had been a mistake. “ - I mean, with chemicals produced by the bacteria to see if one of them stabilizes it. If it does, we’ll be able to replicate the effects of the algae, even as it decomposes.”

N’sal looked startled, as though this was the first time she realized what they were talking about. “You’re trying to make the algae work so you can use it in other places?”

“Well… yeah,” Felicity said, awkwardly. She hadn’t realized how little Kaya had shared about her project.

“Why? So you can take it?” N’sal’s voice was suspicious, but not angry.

“You should… really talk to Kaya about this. This is her project - I’m more of a lab assistant than anything else.” Felicity realized as she said it that it sounded like she was throwing Kaya under the bus. “I think it’s important work, though - even if you never decide to share the formula, you’ll understand how it works. You’ll be able to use it yourselves - maybe even to leave here, to travel.”

N’sal had relaxed when Felicity had made it clear that she considered it to be up to the Kawani to decide what to do with the research. Now she looked puzzled. “Why would we want to do that?”

Ah. Right. N’sal was the wrong person to tempt with dreams of far-flung places and exotic vacations. “Well, it would be an option. And,” Felicity changed the subject to something that she knew would interest N’sal far more, “Because Kaya has isolated the active agent, we were able to concentrate it into a serum that you guys can use against Ra’s al Ghul.” She opened one of the small refrigerators, which she had learned were cooled by running frigid lake water through its metal coils. The only object in this fridge was a small wooden box, which, when Felicity opened it, revealed six small vials of a murky brown liquid.

N’sal counted. “Me, Oliver, Tommy, Roy…”

“Me and Kaya,” Felicity finished. N’sal frowned but didn’t object.

“What about my mother? If you think she’s going to sit this out …”

“Your mother’s vial will be prepared tomorrow, at the last minute. Using traditional methods, as she requested. Hers will be the one we use against him. These are just… backups. If Kaya’s theory is right, that it’s simply a matter of dosage level, then any one of these should be enough to counteract the algae in his system and make him vulnerable, if not kill him outright.” Felicity swallowed, thinking through how to tell N'sal the rest. She may have grown suddenly friendly, but she still wasn't the sort of woman to whom it was easy to deliver bad news. "There's one more thing. These vials aren't just fatal for Ra's - if it makes contact with your blood stream, even through the smallest cut, it could have the same effect on anyone who has depended on the algae to prolong their life." She didn't say the rest - that they might all be beaten and bloody by the time they made it to Ra's, if they made it at all. One shattered vial could wipe out any, or all, of the Kawani women.

N’sal reached out and her hand hovered over the vials, as though tempting herself. “And if Kaya’s wrong?” Her hand drew back and she shoved it behind her back, an uncharacteristically brusque movement. "About the algae being enough to kill him?"

Felicity didn’t like to think about this part. “Well… this is an incredibly powerful dose of the algae. More powerful than you could ever ingest through ordinary means. So, if we’re wrong about how it works, we could be accidentally making him sort of… immortal.” She swallowed and avoided N’sal’s eyes. “I think we’re right, though. The way the algae works is by targeting cell reproduction and RNA repair. At the dose that we’re using, human cells won’t be able to tolerate that level of reproduction.”

N’sal looked interested again. “So he’ll explode?”

“Maybe.” Probably not, but Felicity figured it was best to keep N’sal on board. “Or kind of… melt. We’ll see!”

She expected the other woman to take off and return to training now that she’d gotten the information that she needed. She’d never seen her stand still for this long before. It was making Felicity nervous. Instead, N’sal looked at her thoughtfully.

“I figured Kaya would want to come. I wasn’t sure about you, though.”

“I won’t get in the way,” said Felicity, quickly. She was prepared to defend her position. She knew it wasn’t likely that she would be of much help, but an extra pair of hands in a fight might end up being useful, and her knowledge of the algae couldn’t hurt either. Anyway, if the serum didn’t work, it wouldn’t make much of a difference if she was there or not.

The real reason that she was going, though - the reason that she wasn’t about to share with a woman who would dismiss it as, at best, hopelessly sentimental -- was that staying behind now wouldn’t be like staying behind back home. There, when the door closed behind them, she was still connected. Here, there was no computer, no connection to the outside world - no way for her to keep them safe from the distance of the dark, isolated mines.

There was only one other time that she had said goodbye, knowing that there was nothing she could do to protect him, that the closing door was truly severing them. She had waited, and had faith in him -- and because of that, she had lost him.

She wasn’t going to sit down here in the dark, waiting for news, while he sentenced himself to death. Not ever again.

 

********************

 

Digg frowned at his phone. “Dammit,” he murmured.

“What is it?” Ray paused and looked back. Digg had fallen behind, as Ray had all but broken into a run on their way to the address listed in the file. It was only about 20 blocks from the club, in a section of the Glades that had once been an enclave of working class families but had gone downhill in the years leading up to the earthquake and was now barely hanging on. Still, Digg had learned through a quick property records search, it was one of the neighborhoods that had been a thorn in Malcolm Merlyn’s side as he worked on his gentrification scheme. A lot of the older families had refused to sell, even as they added padlocks to their doors and watched paint flake and front porches sag.

“What is it?” Ray’s voice as he repeated the question was impatient, and Digg realized that he had been lost in thought, frowning at his phone.

“Another missed call from Laurel. She keeps leaving voicemails saying that she needs to talk to me but that she can’t say why over a voicemail. It’s…” _Unsettling._ Digg knew that, these days, Laurel wasn’t easily spooked. But her voicemails sounded urgent, and even fearful. Digg had been alarmed enough to go to her apartment, but it had been dark, and the previous day’s mail was sitting uncollected in her mail slot.

Ray nodded absently. He hadn’t known Laurel long, and while he would usually leap with manic energy into speculating and problem-solving, all of his focus was right now bent on one purpose. Digg pocketed his phone. Ray had the right idea - focus on what they could control.

The address they were looking for was an old two-story Victorian, the kind that had been one spacious house before being subdivided by a landlord to maximize rent. They rang the bell for the second floor apartment - the one listed for Lydia Bainbridge -- but there was no response. After a moment’s hesitation, Ray pressed the buzzer for the first floor apartment. Again, they were greeted with silence, and Digg was already craning his neck, trying to evaluate whether the second floor balcony could support his weight, when the silence was interrupted by a click, a burst of static, and then a woman’s voice, as old and crackling as newspaper that had been yellowed by time.

“Yes?” The voice, despite its age, was peremptory. It was a voice that assumed that anyone ringing on the doorbell had better have a damn good reason for the intrusion. Instinctively, Digg nodded at Ray. He couldn’t help but suspect that Ray was the kind of man who had a way with little old ladies.

Sure enough, Ray’s voice automatically softened, and Digg thought he even caught the suspicion of a drawl as he answered, “So sorry to bother you, ma’am. We’re doing some research into the neighborhood and we’re hoping to speak with some of the more longstanding residents. Would you be willing to speak with us?”

“That depends. Are you going to try to buy my house from me?” The hiss of the speaker did nothing to soften the abrupt tone.

“... No?” Ray looked questioningly at Digg, who placed a hand over the speaker and mouthed, _Merlyn._ Ray, still looking puzzled but seeming to understand the question slightly better, went on. “We understand that there has been some recent real estate interest in the area.” Digg wondered how out of touch the woman must be, to think that her property could still be valuable in the wreckage following the earthquake. Merlyn’s efforts to purchase must have ceased years before. “But we are more interested in the _historical_ value of the neighborhood.”

It was the right thing to say. “Well,” the woman sniffed. “In that case….”

There was another pause, and a muffled shuffling on the other end of the line. Then, just when Digg was beginning to think that the woman must have changed her mind, a buzzer sounded, and the lock in front of them clicked. With Ray behind him and his hand on his holster, Digg pushed open the door and edged forward into inky darkness.

 

*********************

 

Felicity stared at her reflection in the milky, gray water. It was barely visible through the steam, but she could make it out in the flickering lantern light - the weary blue eyes, the loose, haphazard ponytail. In the end, she and Kaya had done all they could, and after adding to the fridge one final vial - smaller and darker than the six others - they had said goodnight and gone off to rest.

Or to try to. Felicity didn’t know how anyone could sleep tonight, but when she had gotten up from her sleeping mat, she had left Roy snoring faintly beside her, and across the room, Tommy, Kaya and N’sal’s breathing was deep and even. She had been unsure about Oliver. As usual.

She had come here because it was one of the few places that she knew how to get to, and because she thought that a bath might help her sleep, or at least ease the chill that seemed to have taken up permanent residence in her bones over the past few days. Whatever else happened, she thought, at least after tomorrow she wouldn’t be trapped in this mine any more. She might end up quite a bit colder, she had to admit - and there was no telling whether she might not end up underground after all, for good. She shivered.

“Cold?”

His voice was gentle, concerned, and she realized that she had been expecting to hear it all along. Was that why she had come here - to give him the chance to follow her? She wrapped her robe more tightly around her and turned to face him.

“Always,” she said, simply. _Always, when I’m away from you._

The movement was slight - nothing more than a clenching of the fist, a shrug of the shoulder to show his struggle as he held himself back from her. She thought about how she would have felt a year ago, knowing how badly he wanted to hold her, to be with her, how much pain it caused him to stay away. Back then, it would have been enough. More than enough.

“Felicity, I…” He looked at her beseechingly. It was a look she had seen before - in the hospital waiting room, when he kissed her, and told her that they would never be together; and again when he said goodbye to her in the basement. It was the look that he gave her whenever he was telling her goodbye, because he didn’t know how to tell her anything else. Suddenly, seeing the desperate, tender sorrow etched into a face as impenetrable as the rock surrounding them, she was flooded with weariness at the familiarity of it all.

“Shut up,” she said, flatly.

He looked startled. “What?”

“I know why you’re here.”

“You do?” He looked, very slightly, alarmed.

“I know you, Oliver. This is what you do. You get all riled up for a big fight, you make your peace with dying, you tell me you love me, and you sweep out the door. I’ve been here before, remember?” Oliver opened his mouth, but she rushed on. “ _No._ Not this time. You came here to say goodbye? Well, I’m not interested. I’m not interested in saying goodbye to you. You’re going to survive tomorrow, _I’m_ going to survive tomorrow, and we are going back to Starling City together where you can have a long, hard sulk about how we’re star crossed or we can’t be together or whatever but I am _not_ saying goodbye to you tonight. Do you hear me? I am _never_ saying goodbye to you again.” She didn’t realize that she was yelling at him until she heard her own voice echo back to her down the long stone hallway. She was probably waking people up, but she didn’t care. _Screw it._ If she couldn’t sleep, why should they? “So whatever you’ve got it in your big, stupid head to say to me right now, you can just take it and -”

She was still forming the words when he closed the distance between them with one stride and, wrapping one arm around her waist and the other around her shoulders so that he completely enfolded her, pulled her to him.

The kiss was hard and hungry. When they had kissed before, it had been tender, wistful - full of dashed hopes and longing. But now, it was as though he had been starving for her, slowly dying of it, for his entire life until this moment. There was no time for tenderness, no breath for words. Her hands raked down his back and, desperate for the feel of his skin, slipped beneath his shirt. His lips followed her jawbone down the length of her neck and began, again, to seek her with bruising force. She gasped and dug her fingers into the hard muscles of his back.

It seemed to bring him back to himself. He wrenched his head away as though struggling against a physical force, but kept her wrapped in his arms. She turned her face up to him, uncertain of whether she was about to kiss him or yell at him for stopping so suddenly, but she was struck into stillness by the look on his face.

He looked.... young. His eyes seemed to fill her vision, and for the first time since she had known them, they were completely focused on her - not scanning the room for possible threats or turned inward towards the cold, lonely landscape of his own mind.

Suddenly, she realized who she was looking at. Not the man she knew, hard and lonely, but the boy who had stepped onto the yacht so long ago. She was seeing Oliver, minus all of those years of hell and loneliness and self-doubt. Oliver with a whole heart, before it had been broken over and over again. He was so beautiful, he took her breath away.

Which was just as well, because it seemed to be taking him some time to figure out what he was trying to say.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to...that’s not what I came in here for.” His voice, a rough, raw whisper, sent chills up her spine, and his eyes sought hers with naked intensity. He didn’t look sorry.

Of course he was apologizing. Of _course._ He’d probably gotten “carried away” again. She meant to pull away and storm out, but she was warm for the first time in days, and her muscles didn’t seem to want to obey her. She settled for glaring up at him from her current position.

To her surprise, he looked flustered. “No - that’s not what I mean. I wanted to kiss you. I just didn’t _mean_ to kiss you.” Before she could speak, he went on, “And before you start yelling again, I didn’t come in here to say goodbye, either. I just… I came in to give you fair warning.” He finally released her, and stepped back. “I’m not saying goodbye, and I’m not going to make any speeches about how we can’t be together. I’m here to tell you that, when we get home to Starling City....” he swallowed, hard, and she realized with a jolt that he was nervous. She wondered if she had ever seen him nervous before. “When we get back to Starling City, I’m going to fight for you.”

It was so unexpected, she could only blink at him. “What?”

“I know I’ve done everything wrong,” he rushed on, as if afraid to let her speak. “And Ray has done everything right. I know I had every chance with you, and I screwed them all up because I was scared, and I don’t deserve another one. But I’m going to _make_ my chance, Felicity. I’m going to fight for you. And Ray can fight back - as hard as he wants - but there’s no way he loves you the way I do because no one has ever loved anyone the way I love you. And if you choose him, I’ll understand, but I won’t stop loving you. And I won’t stop fighting for you. Not ever again.”

Felicity felt dizzy. She took a step backwards and bumped, hard, into the stone bench against the wall, so she sat. Her muscles didn’t seem to be up to much right now, anyway.

“What happened to… all of your reasons?” For the life of her, she couldn’t think of what they were.

Oliver shrugged. “I’ve had it pointed out to me lately, by more than one person, that I may have had a few things backward.” He came closer and, as if afraid to scare her off, slowly lowered himself onto the bench beside her. “I’m still scared, Felicity. I still worry about not being able to keep you safe, and about whether I’m a good enough man to make you happy. But I want to try. If you’re up for it, I really want to try.”

Felicity looked away from him for a long time. “I’m torn,” she admitted.

Oliver nodded, and his voice, when it emerged, was carefully neutral. “OK. I didn’t expect you to fall into my arms,” he said. “I know that you and Ray…"

“I’m torn,” Felicity went on as though he hadn’t spoken. “On the one hand, I really want to see you fight for me. I am _very_ interested in having the full Oliver Queen courtship experience.” She turned back to him, and in the flickering light, tear tracks glittered on her face like diamonds. “On the other hand…”

This time, when her lips found his, the kiss was soft, long, lingering. As if they had all the time in the world.


	19. Chapter 19

Felicity was asleep in his arms. It was almost too much, and not nearly enough – the layers of cloth that kept him from exploring her, from memorizing every soft inch of her, were driving him mad. With each soft breath, the movement of her body derailed his thoughts and sent him spinning into chaos.

And still, it was more than he had dared to hope for. Her soft, sharp exhalations as she sank more deeply into sleep; her forehead and cheeks growing warm against his skin; the soft movements of her lips on his collarbone as she talked to a dream. It was better than all of their stolen moments. Each time he closed his eyes, wondering if she would be gone when he opened them, she was there in his arms, defying probability. His jaw set as he realized that, for the first time since he had left the island, he was on the wrong side of justice, which surely would have dictated that she choose a man who had never taken her for granted, hurt her, or put her in danger. He, unlike Ray, had failed her.

As if she read his thoughts in the tautness of his muscles, she whimpered in her sleep. Her hand, slack on his arm, tensed around what may have been a dream bow. He automatically tightened his arms around her, and she relaxed almost immediately, her breath settling back into soft gusts against his neck. He smiled, absurdly pleased that, in her dreams at least, he could keep her safe. If only it were always so easy – if his arms alone could protect her from the danger that loving him had placed her in.

Idly, he trailed his fingers up the curve of her arm until they encountered an odd interruption. She was wearing something on her arm, beneath the fabric of her sleeve. It felt like a cuff of some sort, which was not the type of jewelry that he had ever known her to wear. He suddenly became aware of how much he didn't know – about her past, the journey she had taken to find him, who she was when she wasn't with him. He remembered how he had felt when he learned of her hacking career in college. He had always taken it for granted that she was an open book, and it had felt strange to realize that she had her own dark places that she kept closed off.

He had the same feeling now – thrown off balance by the realization that she held a private world of memories, regrets, hopes and fears that he had never been invited into: maybe, he realized, because he had never asked for an invitation. It must have been easy, he thought with some shame, to keep things private from him. It wasn't hard to hide what was never sought.

But now he could ask. He remembered their only date, before he had let his fear close him off from her, and how it had felt to have the whole evening ahead to ask the questions that it had never seemed right to ask in the Arrowcave, to listen to her weave her story, knowing that there was all the time in the world to pick up whichever thread came to hand. He felt like that now – but instead of an evening, he had his whole life.

Even as he thought it, the cold alternative seeped in. He had all the time in the world – or no time at all. He had every intention of making it home with her, of proving to her and to himself that he could be both the Arrow and Oliver Queen - the man who loved Starling City, and the man who loved Felicity Smoak. For the first time, it seemed possible.

But tomorrow hung over him like a blade, threatening to fall and sever him from her forever. He gathered her close and settled back against the hard wall. If this was it – the first and the last night that he would spend with her – he wasn't going to sleep through it. He had told the others to rest in preparation for tomorrow, but rest wasn't what he needed. He only needed this: to draw her in and, in the light of the regenerative pool, let his love for her close tightly around them both, like armor.

********************

It was unexpected. From the outside, the house had looked like the others on the block – a little shabbier, maybe, but basically like any other run-down Victorian. But as they stepped through the entryway and Ray's eyes adjusted to the dim light swimming with dust, he couldn't help but feel that he had stepped into a magpie's nest. There was towers of...

“Crap,” muttered Digg beside him. “This place is disgusting.”

But 'disgusting' wasn't quite right. The smell was musty, to be sure, but nothing seemed to be rotting or filthy. In the days after Anna's death, Ray had spent his fair share of time with the shades pulled down, camped out in front of reality TV, and he knew what a hoarder's place was supposed to look like. This was the home of someone who saved everything, sure, but who also used everything. There was no dust. Everything had the look of something that had been recently handled.

Then he saw it. He wasn't proud of the noise that came out of his mouth – somewhere between a gasp and a grunt – but...

“A Datapoint 2200!” He dropped to his knees and immediately felt his stomach lurch when he saw the empty shell and the marks in the plastic where the casing had been pried away from the antique computer's innards. “Oh man, who would do this?” He hopelessly pawed through what remained of the shattered machine.

“I needed the parts.” The voice was cool, indifferent. Digg nudged Ray with his foot, reminding him to maintain either some dignity or some focus, but it was too late. Ray was already rising to his feet to face the girl, who had emerged from the gloom like a sylph from the depths of some murky sea.

“What could you possibly need 45 year old computer parts for that would merit this... this... this vandalism? This destruction of our technological heritage?” He shook his head sadly. “You're young, I know, but someday we're going to realize just how reckless we've been with our history and I just think that....”

Digg cleared his throat. “Miss, is your mother home?”

Ray blinked. He looked again at the young woman, who couldn't be older than 20 – clearly too young to be the owner of the creaky voice on the other end of the phone – and the room, realizing that much of the detritus clearly dated from before her time.

“Yeah, but you can't talk to her.” The girl nodded at the top of a carefully stacked pile of old radios, where an urn teetered somewhat precariously.

“Oh.” _Lydia had a daughter?_ Ray recalled the birth date on file, and mentally revised the age of the woman in front of him. 18 or so, if Lydia had become a mother when she was a teenager, but with a prepossession and self-assurance that reminded him of Thea Queen. “I'm, um... sorry for your loss.”

She shrugged, wispy blond hair dislodging from a high bun at even this slight movement. Everything about her seemed wispy, Ray realized, except for her gaze. She looked back at him with pale gray eyes of steel. “It wasn't much of a loss, according to my grandmother. Whom you're here to see, I assume.” She turned her back and gestured for them to follow. “She doesn't know her social security number; I'm in charge of the credit cards; and she's never even heard of Nigeria, let alone Nigerian princes, so don't bother. I'll be listening.” She opened a door into a room that, if possible, seemed even gloomier than the entryway, and gestured for them to follow.

Fifteen minutes later, after leaving the girl behind in the dim, oppressive house with the old woman, Ray and Digg stood silently on the sidewalk, letting the sun warm them. Ray felt as though it would take hours for the chill to leave his bones.

The old woman had been... vile. If nothing else, the way she treated her granddaughter – like a servant – would have been unforgivable. But there was also the way she spoke of her daughter. Despite her language - “simpleton” and “slut” had been the kindest options – and with the aid of a few choice words and eye rolls from the granddaughter, a picture had emerged of a lonely woman who depended on a misunderstood sense of humor and deep loyalty to her brother to get through a claustrophobic, miserable dependence on her mother. The glasses retainer had evidently been a gesture of both: the old woman had instructed her to buy a graduation gift that symbolized her son's achievements in the field of nuclear physics - “something appropriate”- and then given her ten dollars and sent her out the door. The daughter had done something that Ray found hauntingly familiar – expressed her rage in the only way available to her, by following her instructions to the letter and making her abuser look like a fool. She printed the glasses retainer with what was unarguably one of the greatest achievements of science, however tacky or uncomfortable it might be to wear as a fashion accessory - and all within the miserly old woman's price point.

The only kind words the old woman had had were for her son. He was a genius, he was the only remaining pride of a once great family, he was all she had left to live for... and he called to check in at the same time every Sunday.

“Even _I_ can hack the phone company.” They started down the street, side by side, and Ray had a moment of wondering what they might look like from a distance – two friends enjoying a stroll in the sunshine. He wondered if his life would ever really be the way it looked from the outside. “It's easy now. We get the phone number; we get the address.”

“And then?” Digg's voice had a hard edge of worry to it. Ray knew what he thought – that this was going to come down to Digg protecting this man from Ray, or Ray from himself. Maybe he was right. God knows he had thought about it enough - in the early hours of the morning when dreams of Anna's final gasps of pain had driven him out of bed and into frantic motion.

He closed his eyes for a moment, recalled the dream feel of her beside him on the beach, her cool laugh, her warm hand in his. That was Anna, he thought fiercely. Not the victim on the sidewalk, drowning in her own blood and pain. “I'm not Oliver, Digg. I'm not going to go dark on you.”

Digg's shoulders rose almost imperceptibly, and Ray realized that it had come out wrong. “I didn't mean – no offense to him.” Were all of his relationships from now on going to be devoted to tiptoeing around the sacred memory of Oliver Queen? “I just mean that you don't have to worry. I can't rip this dude’s head off, remember? He’s the one who gave Connor the machine, which means he’s the one who’s trying to track down Slade Wilson. We need to find out why.” He stopped and reached out, forcing Digg to stop too and face him. “Hey. Listen. I solemnly swear not to murder in cold blood the man who killed my fiancee until _after_ we find out why he gave a brainwashing machine to a messed up kid in an attempt to track a nefarious criminal to a deserted island-prison at the edge of the world. OK?”

It was, he thought, maybe the least Oliver-like thing he could have said. Digg looked down for a moment, his face in shadow, and then met Ray's eyes. “And I promise not to kick your ass, lock you up, tie you down, or knock you out unless you totally fucking lose it.”

Ray didn't realize how tense he had been until the tightness left his shoulders in a rush. He thought about punching Digg on the arm, then thought better of it. Instead, he turned away from the long shadows the sun was casting behind them on the sidewalk, and started back towards what he was already starting to think of as home.

********************

Just before dawn, Oliver gently shook Felicity awake. She stirred and blinked the sleep out of her eyes. Though she knew that it had only been a few hours since they had left the others, she felt like she had slept soundly for the first time in weeks – no, longer. For the first time since she had watched Oliver walk away to face Ra's al Ghul.

And now it was time to face him again. Oliver was watching her carefully, as though afraid that, in the light of day – or what passed for light down here – she would come to her senses and change her mind about them. Gently, she placed one hand on either side of his face and drew him towards her. Even more gently, she touched her lips to his. She could feel him relax the moment they touched, even as the warmth poured through her own body, melting her stiff and sore muscles.

She stood to go, and he reached out to grab her hand. She turned back to him, reluctantly, and realized that she was still superstitiously afraid that if they talked it would be over. She shook her head at him, beseechingly. He smiled wryly.

“No – wait. I know that I ruined this before. I'm not going to do that again.” He pulled her towards him, still seated, so that she was standing between his parted knees and he was looking up at her. She tilted her head towards him and her hair fell around them like a curtain. He smiled lightly and let his eyes linger on her in a way that sent shivers down her back. He had never looked at her for so long, with no effort to tear his eyes away. She knew then that he meant what he had said the night before – he was done running away from them. Tentatively, still unable to believe that he was hers, she traced his jaw, lightly, with one finger, then let her touch trail down his neck as she followed it with her lips. He closed his eyes and sighed.

Finally, she pulled back and smiled ruefully. “We don't have time for this. The others will be looking for us.”

He had tucked her hair behind her ear and was becoming preoccupied with tracing its shape with his lips. “Well, we'll have a couple of minutes before they find us.” He pulled aside the strap of her tank top, exposing her shoulder, and let his lips travel lower.

She pulled back with a gasp of laughter. “OK, that is going to take longer than a couple of minutes.”

“Not if we really, really focus.” Now he had found her mouth again, and small, soft kisses were beginning to deepen – he really was focused – when she forced herself to pull back again. For a moment she let herself linger with her lips an inch away from his, their noses barely touching, and his eyes filling her vision.

“Don't go,” he whispered.

“Oliver, we have to -”

“Not that. Not now. I mean – don't go, today. Stay here. Please.”

Even as he said it, his tone was soft, defeated. She knew that he knew what her answer would be, but it still broke her heart. She would have done anything for him – anything except let him walk away from her again.

“Don't ask me that. You know it's not fair.” His eyes dropped, but he didn't move away, and neither did she. She could feel his breath on her lips when he spoke again.

“If I could know that you were here, safe....”

“You would take risks that you won't take if I'm there. You would feel free to get yourself killed.” She could feel the anger rising as she spoke, and pulled back. How many times did they have to have this fight?

“No.” His hand closed more tightly on hers, keeping her from pulling any farther away. Unlike hers, his voice wasn't angry, but the sadness in it was worse. She found her own anger draining away in response, and fought the urge to put her arms around him. She would be damned if she was going to comfort him when he was pissing her off. “I know that I didn't fight as hard as I should have, the first time I faced him. When I said goodbye to you then, it really was goodbye. I didn't see a way for us to be together, and I didn't see a reason to come back to Starling City if I couldn't be with you.”

The anger flared again. “So first you made up your mind that we couldn't be together, and then you made up your mind to go off and die? Oliver Queen, if you hadn't already proven that you're pretty immune to death, I would kill you.”

“OK, but can we fight about that another time, please?” The corners of his mouth lifted. She was going to teach him not to smile at her in the middle of arguments – it was distracting. “What I'm trying to tell you is that this time is different. This time I know what I'm fighting for – my life. My life with you, back home. You and Thea and Digg and Roy. I'm not ready to leave any of you. And I swear that this time, if you promise to keep yourself safe, I'll do the same. This isn't me going off to get killed, OK? This is me going off to _win_.”

She sat down next to him, wearily. There was no time. How could she explain to him that, no matter how reasonable he made it sound, no matter how much she believed in him – and she did believe in him, all the way to her marrow – she could no more let him walk away from her than she could grow wings and fly?

She didn't need to explain it. He saw the look on her face, sighed heavily – the opposite, she thought, of the blissful little sigh he had breathed in her arms – and looked away for a moment. When he looked back, his eyes were hooded and heavy, but his tone was light. “OK. It was worth a try. I guess I knew that I didn't have much of a chance.” She started to rise, and once more, he drew her back. “How about this?” And now there was a desperate edge to his voice. “You come, but if it starts to go bad, you run. You _run_. And you don't look back. Promise me. It's the only way I'll be able to focus on anything other than you. I've seen you run, Felicity. I know you can get yourself out, if you don't stop for anything. Or anyone.”

She smiled at him, trying to match her own tone to his light one of a few seconds ago. “OK. I promise.”

He held her gaze for a long moment and sighed again. She could spend an entire lifetime, she thought, cataloging the nuances of his sighs - maybe, when all of this was over, she would. “You, Felicity Smoak, are a terrible liar. But I love you anyway.”

He had kissed her and vanished before she had time to respond, leaving her behind in the empty, steamy room, trying in vain to catch her breath.

********************

Thea stood on the stairs and surveyed the basement – or at least, what used to be the basement, and what she had now come to think of as Oliver's lair. She had knocked before entering, hating herself for her hesitation. This was, after all, her property. But something about the way John Diggle and Ray Turner had been storming in and out, with assurance and urgency, made her feel like a stranger in her own club.

Well, enough of that. She marched down the stairs briskly, a handful of envelopes in her hand. She would have to speak with Digg about getting mail here – sorting his and Roy's out from the envelopes actually intended for the club was starting to make her feel like a secretary. Maybe, if Oliver came home, they could add a second mailbox – call it “apartment 1,” or something – so that The Arrow could pick up his own mail and she could get on with her club.

If. The word had slipped in inadvertently. When, she corrected herself. When Oliver comes home. She would have to speak with him about his housekeeping habits, too, when he came home. The air down here smelled... “stale” would be a kind word for it.

She dropped the stack of mail on the first table she came to, absently registering the stained envelope smelling slightly of beer. Odd. She had received an envelope like that as well – it was sitting upstairs on her desk with a stack of bills. She hadn't even taken the time to glance at the writing on it before coming down here, but now she was curious. She would look at it as soon as she got back up to her office.

She looked around, proprietorially, and wondered if she should take advantage of Oliver's absence to do a bit of remodeling. Their equipment was top of the line, but the space could certainly be made more comfortable. All it would take was a bit of creativity, and a lot of money - the thought, annoyingly, made her feel guilty again. Oliver had always been the one in control, both of his life and his bank account, while she had always felt as though she was only entitled to his leftovers. When she was young, he had seemed like a god – always laughing, always in the center of a crowd, always throwing money around, but in a way that made the people around him feel special instead of humbled. How many times had she watched as Oliver had, for a brief period of time, showered attention and gifts on some lucky girl, and dreamed about the day that a man would make her feel that way?

Of course, with Laurel, it had been different. Laurel hadn't wanted gifts – except for commitment, which was the one gift that Oliver had never seemed able to give. Young as she had been, Thea had known on some level, even then, that Laurel and Oliver weren't ever going to be able to make each other happy. Oliver had Laurel so high on a pedestal that he finally got too lonely down below on his own. And Laurel saw Oliver, not just for his good qualities – that was what he deserved, Thea loyally believed – but _only_ for his good qualities, dooming herself to perpetual disappointment.

Thea realized that she was standing in front of the case containing Oliver's Arrow outfit, and scowled at it. Stupid costume. This was creepy – standing alone in a basement, looking at the ghost of her brother's alter ego, and contemplating his love life. She gave herself a shake and vowed that, once Oliver got home, they would have a long talk. It was time for him to stop treating her like the little sister that he could put away when he wasn't concentrating on protecting her.

She turned away, avoiding the case next to the Arrow’s. Speaking of stupid costumes… then, the spidery, cramped writing on the envelope upstairs scrolled through her mind, and her feet were responding before her mind knew why. She flew up the stairs, wondering how she hadn’t seen it before.

********************

Oliver made it back to his mat just as N'sal was waking up. She gave him a suspicious look, glanced at Felicity's empty mat, and grinned knowingly. Oliver rolled his eyes. He had never thought he would miss N’sal trying to kill him.

Tommy was the next to stir, then Kaya. Roy, as usual, took some coaxing, but Felicity was back in the room in time to offer him a sympathetic granola bar, and soon they group was sitting in a tight circle around a stove that was both boiling water for coffee and warding off the early morning chill.

When Oliver had made up his mind to tell Felicity how he felt before they went into battle, he thought that the most he had to hope for was that he still had a fighting chance against Ray. Now that he knew that he had so much more than that, he was having a disturbingly hard time focusing on the fight ahead. Instead of analyzing Ra's al Ghul's weak points, he was preoccupied with escape routes in case he needed to get her out, fast. He knew better than to trust her promise that she would leave – if it came down to it, she would die with him before she left him behind. _Stupid_ , he thought furiously, ignoring the inconvenient recollection that he would never consider leaving her behind either.

“Her best shot is if we stick to the plan and beat Ra's. If you're distracted trying to protect her, you'll only be putting her in more danger.” Oliver was startled by N'sal's voice.

“What?”

“I could tell that you're thinking about Felicity.” N'sal looked pointedly at Roy, who tried to look like he _had_ been thinking about Felicity, and not the sketch of entry points that Katherine had passed around. “Oh. Right. Sorry. I was thinking about her, but I'll... I'll focus up.” Felicity closed her eyes in embarrassment at his poor acting, and Oliver studiously avoided anyone else's gaze. N'sal was right, though – his best bet at getting Felicity out was by surviving himself, and the best chance of doing that came with sticking to the plan.

Sticking to the plan with one change.

“I think we should split you two up so that you’ll be less distracted. Roy, you and Tommy have been sparring together a lot. And Tommy and I are the only ones who have been inside the League compound. We should switch pairs – instead of me and Tommy, Felicity and I should bring Katherine in the east entrance and you two can take the west with Kaya. That way, each group will have one person who has an idea of the layout.”

Katherine frowned. “Is it wise to change the plan this close to execution?”

Oliver swallowed his desperation and tried to appear nonchalant. Roy and Tommy did what they could to help him out.

“He's right. We made the original pairings before we all got to know each other. Roy and I can team up just as well as Oliver and I could,” Tommy spoke up.

Roy nodded emphatically, then seemed to remember to look conflicted about being torn asunder from his true love.

N'sal shrugged impatiently, and Kaya had already moved on. Only Katherine seemed to hesitate, but she didn't object when Kaya spoke. “Fine. The plan is the same - two groups, plus N'sal on her own, pushing for the throne room. Tommy goes in through the apprentice quarters and training rooms, and Oliver uses the tunnel entrance to the root cellar. N'sal....”

“Will go in the front door,” N'sal said, coolly, testing the point on an arrow before adding it to her quiver.

“...Will cause a diversion while the other groups penetrate. Once we're inside, we have no way of knowing what we're going to run into – which rooms are patrolled, which are empty. Everyone has a vial, so only one of us needs to make it. Whoever is still standing at the end of the fight – that person gets to Ra's, and uses their vial.”

Not a shadow crossed her face as she discussed the possibility of one of them – members of her own family – not making it. Oliver assented with the rest, but silently vowed that Felicity, Tommy and Roy would all survive. He had known since they started this, with a bone-deep certainty, that he wasn't leaving anyone behind - even if it meant leaving Ra’s alive.

  
********************

They moved through the tunnels like ghosts, and Felicity couldn't shake the feeling that that was exactly what they were surrounded by – generations of dead Kawani who hadn't lasted long enough to see the restoration of their lands, but who had risen from the grave now to silently witness the final battle. Felicity felt a prickling on the back of her neck and visualized hundreds of hollow eyes fixed on her, hundreds of still hearts trembling into life with the hope of her mission.

She turned and glared at N'sal, whose breath on the back of her neck was causing the prickle. “Could you back off, maybe?” she hissed. They were far enough below ground still that nothing would be heard above, but they had all, by tacit agreement, fallen into a silence punctuated only by occasional whispers. She preferred it this way, knowing that if she tried to speak normally they would hear that her voice was shaking. Whispers, she had discovered, were better for disguising terror.

N'sal glared back at her. “I would, if we could pick up the pace a little bit. I was thinking that we could get up there sometime before next summer.”

Felicity turned away to hide a smile. N'sal's edge was back, which was a relief. She didn't want the new, supportive N'sal facing the multitude of League members that were sure to be guarding the front door. When the other woman had volunteered to cause a diversion while the others entered through less well-guarded side tunnels, Felicity had assumed that it was a suicide mission. Then she had seen her take on a crowd of challengers on the training mat, knocking them down as quickly as they could attack. And that was when she was being careful _not_ to cause lasting damage. Felicity knew that N'sal would be willing to sacrifice her life if it was necessary, but she had been relieved to realize that it didn't seem to be in her plan. She wasn't planning on saying any final goodbyes today.

Oliver looked back and cocked an eyebrow at her. “Everything OK back there?”

Felicity grinned. “N'sal would appreciate it if we could sprint, instead of marching, into near-certain death.”

Oliver rolled his eyes. Roy, who had come up to Felicity in time to hear her last words, frowned. “Um, is that your plan? Because I'm not digging the idea of going into battle with a suicide squad. I was kind of planning to eat one more Big Belly Burger before I died. Maybe two.”

“Maybe a Bacon Double Trouble with a Chocolate Malty Mountain shake,” chimed in Tommy, a dreamy edge to his voice.

“And a heap of Saucy Sassy Fries,” sighed Felicity.

“Seriously?” snapped N'sal, again crowding Felicity from behind. “We just had breakfast.”

“No, we just had porridge,” Tommy said, sadly. “I can't remember the last time I had _breakfast_.”

“Well, think of it this way," Oliver offered. "If we make it back to 'town,' maybe Harvey will still have some powdered eggs left.”

“God, how sad is it that that sounds good to me right now?” Felicity murmured, and Oliver reached back to squeeze her hand.

“When we get home, I will buy you all the Sassy Fries you can eat. You will be drowning in Sassy Fries.”

“With extra spicy sauce?”

“Of course.”

“Careful, Queen. You haven't seen this girl eat since she started her training regimen. She'll probably bankrupt you.” Felicity saw Roy's teeth flash in the dark.

“Good thing I'm already bankrupt,” Oliver said lightly, and gave Felicity's hand a squeeze before dropping it.

Suddenly, a wall of earth loomed before them. If Felicity hadn’t seen the map herself, she would have assumed it was a dead end. Instead, she turned to her right and peered into the darkness, where she could just make out a narrow opening leading into a side tunnel that would take her, Katherine and Oliver to the cellars. This was where they were to part ways.

Katherine, Kaya, and N'sal were silent. Maybe, Felicity thought, they had said goodbye in private. Or maybe when you were a billion years old, you had outgrown the need for displays of affection.

Well, screw it. She wasn’t a billion years old. She stepped forward and threw her arms around Roy with such force that he grunted.

“I love you,” she said, earnestly. Let him believe it was for the sake of their audience, if he wanted.

“Yeah,” he muttered gruffly. She felt him press his lips into her hair for a brief moment. “Me too.”

 _Not goodbye. This is not goodbye._ She stepped back, heart in her throat, tears in her eyes.

“See you,” said Tommy, casually. Roy looked down, tucking his chin into his neck, shading his eyes.

“Yeah,” said Oliver, softly. “You will.”

  
********************

Thea’s feet hit the pavement, making no more noise than if she had been a cat. She probably could have waited out of sight in an abandoned doorway - there were plenty of them in this neighborhood - but she had picked up the habit from Merlyn of lurking up high whenever possible. She secretly believed that he did it for effect - so that he could drop like a panther when he wanted to make an entrance - but she had to admit that it was effective, so she had squirreled herself away in a busted fire escape while she waited.

Her letter burned in her pocket. It had been brief, full of scratched-out lines and beer-blotted ink, and carrying with it, she could swear, the faintest smell of woodsmoke and pine. She only knew what it smelled like because, with an urgent impulse that embarrassed her now, she had momentarily held the letter to her lips, desperate to catch a breath of the last place he had been before casting himself into the wilderness.

 _A martyr_. That’s what he was. First their relationship, and now, probably, his life, to the cause - her brother. The mountain that no one in her life could seem to resist trying to conquer. The precipice that everyone she loved leapt off, certain that they could grow wings.

Including, evidently, the two men who, after a brief, hushed conversation outside the rundown old house, were now headed back to Verdant with an air so complacent, she wouldn’t have been surprised to see them link arms.

She had tracked them to this address - left up on the computer screen for anyone to see, making her wonder whether either of them really grasped the idea of “stealth” - for a reason that didn’t include nosing into whatever their reason for being here was. Once she had read her own (infuriatingly brief) letter, she didn’t feel like waiting for Digg to return to open his.

She couldn’t quite explain her sense of urgency. It was probably from Felicity - the handwriting, beneath the smudges and smears, looked familiar but odd, as though it had been written on an uneven surface or in poor light - but she had set out to track him down, unable to concentrate on anything else without knowing what the envelope held.

“Stupid,” she muttered. It didn’t matter what the letter said; whatever the words, it meant the same thing. Her father, her brother, her ex - it was the one thing they had in common. When the moment crystallized to a choice between life with her, or death for a cause, she was going to lose every time. And every time, she would pick up the remains of herself and begin, alone, to piece the shards back together.

********************

The gates at the far end of the southern courtyard had been designed to be imposing, but whoever built them had a very narrow idea of what imposing was - towering spikes that had been sharpened at the top to pinprick sharpness. N’sal gave it a disdaining look. She could have gotten over it in a second, silently and invisibly to the guards whose patrol brought them past this spot every thirteen minutes - but that wasn’t the plan.

She backed up and surveyed the courtyard. In three minutes, the bell would chime to summon the apprentices to their morning exercise. She would be here to greet them.

Three minutes. N’sal turned her back on the gates to survey the plateau and, beyond that, the tundra. Though they had been up for hours, morning was only now beginning to break. She shivered, but not from the cold. This cold was in her blood.

In a moment, the sun would break over the horizon. Already the stars had faded and the darkness was relenting to the light like ink in water. Soon there would be no sign that the night had been there at all, except for the tracks of the animals that only felt safe coming out in the dark.

Two minutes. She was no fool. She knew that taking on a dozen League members - even novices - was likely to be a one way mission. But Kaya would survive, and would lead the Kawani as they regained their land. That was good - Kaya had the intelligence and the diplomacy to deal with other nations as theirs came out of the shadows and once more took their place in the world. N’sal knew what the future would hold; she didn’t need to see it. All she had ever wanted was this - to walk her own land in the light of day. Unafraid.

One minute. Suddenly her heart was in her throat, along with all of the words that she hadn’t tried to say. What would become of him? He would make it home, she told herself. He would find his way home, back to Laurel, and he would be safe and happy. And he would remember her. She closed her eyes, and swallowed, hard. _He would remember her_.

Footsteps, quickening to a run: first one set, then many. Voices shouting. Eyes closed still, she crossed her arms in front of her and grasped a hilt in each hand, but she didn’t draw yet. Not yet. She turned to face her soon-to-be attackers. Soon-to-be victims.

She felt it when it happened - in the warmth on her back, the pulse in her throat, the whisper as the tundra came to life. Behind her, sun hit the horizon, broke open like blown glass, and spilled its light like blood across her land. She drew her swords, and as the sound of metal on leather sang across the morning air, she opened her eyes.

*********************


	20. Chapter 20

Tommy surveyed the wall, peppered irregularly with small, warped windows. “All I’m saying is, they designed these stupid things to be impregnable.”

Roy tested the weight of the special arrows in his hands. “Yeah, well, Felicity designed these specially to… impregnate.” Even as he said it, he wrinkled his nose.

“Unfortunate choice of words.” Kaya agreed, standing a few steps behind them, gazed doubtfully up at the wall. Roy understood the feeling. Now that they were face to face with it, tackling the least vulnerable side of the compound didn’t seem like as good an idea as it had in the shelter of the mines.

Still. “We don’t have to win. Just draw enough of them into the fight to give the others a chance.”

There was a moment’s thoughtful silence.

“It would be _nice_ to win, though.” Tommy sounded wistful.

“Yeah, winning gets my vote. I mean, they’re only world-class assassins with abilities that border on the supernatural, right? Shouldn’t you guys be able to wipe the floor with them?” Roy wondered Kaya was feeling as nonchalant as she sounded. He sure wasn't; his heart was racing, his mind flying from thought to thought like a bird between branches.

Birds. He’d been thinking about them a lot lately. There were so damn many of them up here. He had read somewhere, maybe before survival had become more important than school, that no one knew how birds nearly always managed to fly true over thousands of miles, never steering off course; that it could be that they simply had amazing memories, but that some scientists had discovered something like a magnet inside one species, which electrified their nervous systems, orienting them in the right direction.

Roy peered down the shaft of the arrow, aiming it at one of the warped old windows, and wondered if Thea could ever understand that Oliver may had taught him how to fly, but that it was she who electrified him, who beat inside him like a bird’s wing; that she was both the magnet and the pole that drew him home.

“So. This is going to work?” Tommy broke into Roy’s thoughts, tilting his head so he was sighting along the shaft of the arrow. “That thing’s not just going to break against the glass?”

Roy shrugged, the arrow bobbing up and down. “Felicity says it’s just chemistry and physics. The friction with the air will increase the temperature of the surface just enough to start a reaction between the chemicals she painted on.” He looked uncertainly at Kaya. She doubtlessly understood it better, but Felicity had spent a long time painstakingly explaining the concept to him, and he didn’t want to let her down. “Then, once the chemicals are activated, the impact with the window will make them explode. A grenade would just bounce off, but because the explosion will happen where the tip of the arrow hits the window…” Roy frowned. This was where he lost the concept, but he soldiered on. “...the combination of heat and pressure will shatter the glass.” He shrugged. “Science."

“Science.” Tommy looked thoughtfully at Roy, then the formidable wall, then back to Roy. “And if it doesn’t work?”

Again, the arrow shrugged with Roy. “Either the arrow explodes in my hand or it bounces harmlessly off the window, alerting the League without doing any damage, preventing us from getting in and making it very easy for them to herd us off the _very_ steep cliff behind us.”

Tommy frowned. “I see. You’re trusting 'science' on this one, then?”

Roy drew the bow. He closed he eyes and could almost feel the cold water rising, Felicity’s voice walking him through their plan, delivering them safely to the other side. Felicity’s voice all those nights back in Starling City, letting him know where Digg and Oliver were, where the bad guys were, what was coming around the next corner. How to stay alive.

“Nah.” He relaxed his hand and the arrow took flight, soaring above them like something alive, its shadow skittering across the ground as if seeking shelter from the coming battle, and he turned to Tommy, without waiting to see the impact. He already knew what was about to happen. “I’m trusting Felicity.”

The arrow found its arc and burst into a hundred soaring flames, fragments of light greeting the sun that had chosen that moment to break over the horizon. Roy let another arrow fly, and another. As frantic voices rose from within, Kaya knelt beside him, murmuring a blessing, her hands clutching at the earth like a child at its mother's dress. Tommy dove for one of the broken windows as each arrow in turn burst into flame, shattering one window after another, filling the morning with dancing light and smoke that bloomed upwards like a message, or a warning.

********************

The walls _were_ closing in. It wasn’t her imagination. When Felicity held her arms out to her sides, her fingertips brushed the packed earth that had, a quarter of a mile ago, replaced the the smooth, worn stones of the more frequented tunnels. This one was an outlier - a passage that had been boarded up when the mines had ceased to be used for their original purpose. Katherine had sworn that, if they kept moving, they would eventually end up directly below the root cellar of the League compound.

Oliver was pulling ahead, and Felicity let him. She was concerned about Katherine, who was breathing heavily behind her. Finally, when the older woman tripped and barely saved herself from falling by grasping at Felicity’s back, the latter stopped and turned around.

“Are you OK?” She tried to keep the impatience out of her voice. If the woman wasn’t up to this, she should have spoken up earlier.

Katherine’s eyes were fever-bright, and she was breathing heavily. “I’ll make it. That’s all that matters.” She grabbed Felicity’s upper arm to steady herself, and her hand tightened when she felt the shape of the cuff.

N’sal had told her to keep it, but Felicity realized that the cuff, coming as it had from Katherine’s dead sister, probably by rights now belonged to the older woman. Her cheeks burned, and she tried to believe that she hadn’t done anything wrong; but it was clear that the right thing to have been to return it. Reluctantly, she pushed up the heavy brown wool sleeves of the Kawani cloak that she had drawn tightly around her as they traveled further away from the fire-lit warmth of the central caves. The cuff was still warm from her skin as she handed it to Katherine, who looked at it thoughtfully before shrugging and tucking it away in the folds of her own cloak.

Felicity tried not to feel disappointed. She would much rather have given it to N’sal, though she knew it wasn't her choice to make. The outer skin of the cuff showed a series of pictures, which N’sal said represented the history of the Kawani. Some of them were tiny but the one that terminated at the edge of the cuff was clear enough. It was a group of individuals, remarkably detailed. Leading them to the unknown land beyond the edge of the leather was a woman, tall and slim, bearing a bow and arrow in a stance that made it clear that she was ready for battle. From the first moment she had seen N’sal and her bow, silhouetted against the light of the moon,  Felicity had known where the cuff belonged.

Ahead of them, Oliver stopped. He held a hand behind him, gesturing for the two women to be still, and cocked his head. Once the sounds of their footsteps stilled, Felicity heard it too - far off voices. Even at a distance, they sounded alarmed. Oliver grinned.

“That’ll be Tommy and Roy.” He looked back over his shoulder and his smile faded. “We should pick up the pace.” Felicity knew what it was costing him not to be able to rush to the aid of their friends.

Despite her labored breathing, Katherine kept up with the punishing new pace that Oliver set, and within minutes the tunnel narrowed so dramatically that they had to crawl. As it narrowed, it made an abrupt turn upwards and became so steep that it took all of Felicity's concentration to keep from slipping backwards. Loose soil crumbled beneath her fingers and she tried not to be concerned about Katherine, struggling behind her – then, suddenly, Oliver disappeared from view. After a moment, he reappeared, this time head first.

“This is it,” he whispered, and reached down to clasp her hand. Realizing that it was more efficient than struggling against what was becoming a near-vertical wall of packed earth, Felicity relaxed and let him pull her up until she emerged onto a dirt floor; the two of them then turned and helped Katherine through the tunnel mouth, and stood surveying the room the had entered. It was large and shadowed - a root cellar that had long ago been converted into a pantry but still retained, somehow, a whiff of potato and apples. Now, it was lined with shelves of unlabeled jars with brightly colored contents.

When Felicity turned back to survey their entrance, she almost didn’t see it in the dim light. It was a narrow crack, low in the wall of the deepest corner of the cellar. If she hadn’t come through it herself, she never would have guessed that lying beyond it was a steep drop-off to the tunnels below. She also realized, looking at it now, how lucky they were that their movements hadn’t caused the soil to cave in around them and fill in the narrow opening. Perhaps the dirt was more structurally sound than it looked; still, she decided, they would find a different, safer way out. Assuming, of course, that they made it out at all.

The exit to the cellar was obvious – a wooden trap door that, according to the plans, would lead to the kitchens above, which should be deserted due both to the time of day and the distraction caused by Tommy, Roy and Nyssa's incursions. If they tried to come up through the trapdoor with anyone in the room above them, they might as well turn themselves into the League right now. There was no way to cover such a vulnerable entry point.

Which was why the footsteps above them were very, very bad news. 

Felicity closed her eyes in defeat. The League were smarter than they had given them credit for - even in an emergency with multiple security breaches, they had left someone to guard the least likely of entry points.

Oliver drew himself up, his mouth set in a straight line. “So we improvise. They can’t have left too many people behind - we’ll draw them down here. We just need some kind of diversion.”

Katherine straightened up, too, and the fatigue seemed to fall away from her. Felicity felt her heart begin to beat faster. Unsure why her every nerve ending was  screaming danger, she met the old woman’s eyes in the dim light, and remembered that in Katherine’s world, age wasn’t the same thing as weakness.

“Yes,” Katherine’s voice was oddly sad. “We do.”

Felicity moved first, but Katherine was as quick as a striking snake, grabbing Felicity around her upper arm and, in one smooth movement, thrusting the cuff back in place. “I have no use for a dead woman's trinket,” she hissed in Felicity’s ear.

It didn’t matter that the movement itself was harmless. All Oliver saw was Katherine’s hand moving towards Felicity with something from her pocket, and he leapt toward them. Katherine was ready; as he approached, she turned smoothly, and, with such speed and grace that he may as well have been moving in slow motion, swept her leg up in a smooth arc, catching him in his midsection and using his own momentum to propel him past her and back through the tunnel opening. He scrambled for a desperate moment to gain purchase on the wall, succeeded only in loosening the soil and sending massive clumps of it tumbling down after him.

The sound was momentous, and for a moment, Felicity couldn’t figure it out; surely Oliver’s impact couldn’t have made that deep rumble that set the ground beneath her feet vibrating. Then she recalled her earlier thought about how lucky they had been to avoid an avalanche, and she understood. Oliver’s desperate scrambling had set off what their earlier cautious footfalls had avoided.

Above them, voices rose in panic, and when Felicity glanced around, Katherine had melted into the shadows. Unwilling to go after her and leave Oliver behind, but equally unwilling to let Katherine escape, Felicity stood paralyzed for one agonizing moment. The soil groaned and began to shift and heave. She had to decide.

Except that there was no decision to make. Turning her back on the cellar and the wooden door that even now was yawning open, Felicity threw herself through the curtain of dirt after Oliver.

*

He could almost believe it was the nightmare again, the one where he lost her – except that this time they were underground, not in a restaurant, and he was surrounded by dust and raining dirt, not clouds of smoke. But there was an explosion, and she was there, just out of reach; and he was grotesquely powerless, his limbs flailing helplessly. He had let it happen again – he had been so focused on her that he hadn't seen the threat when it was right in front of him, and because of that carelessness, he was going to lose her.

_No._ She was safe up above him. She was safe, and it wasn't a dream; his reflexes knew it, even if his mind didn't. Before he could hit the ground, he had caught himself, using his hands against the sides of the narrow tunnel to slow, and then stop himself from sliding endlessly downwards.

At least, that was the plan. No sooner had he found his footing and looked up to get his bearings, than a tangle of blonde hair and windmilling arms caught him full in the chest, knocking the wind out of him.

“ _Oof.”_ They went down together, somersaulting and skidding down the steepest section of the passage until they reached a small ledge just before what, in the avalanche, had become a steep drop-off. A pit yawned in front of them. Desperately, Oliver kicked out a foot to catch the opposite wall and threw an arm to either side, managing, barely, to keep both of them from sliding over.

He lay for a moment on the ledge with her weight on him like an anchor, and wrapped his arms around her. She seemed to be shaking, or maybe it was him.

After a moment, he sat up slowly, shifting her weight off of him, and prodded the dirt around them gingerly. When he found them, he inspected her glasses, surprised to find them intact and unscratched. Placing a finger under her chin, he tilted her face towards him, placed the glasses gently on her face, smudged a clump of dirt off her nose, and kissed the cleared spot.

“Ray will be pleased.” She took the glasses off and squinted at them, impressed. “He had them specially designed. They're superhero glasses.”

“So glad,” Oliver said, dryly. “I'm sure he'll be thrilled to hear that you tested them by getting yourself into an avalanche. Which, by the way, was maybe _not_ your smartest move.”

She peered into the chasm they had almost tumbled into and shuddered. “Yeah, well, I'm supposed to be the smart one. So _I'll_ be the judge of the relative smartness of moves. And I say, if one of us is going to get buried alive, we're _both_ going to get buried alive.” She frowned. “Hey, why can I see you? Not to mention this bone-chillingly deep hole that we’re sitting awfully close to?”

“Because I found your glasses.”

“No, I mean, why is there enough light to see you by? When I went through, the tunnel entrance was collapsing, but if it had caved in completely, we wouldn't be getting any light down here.”

“Oh.” Oliver looked around. He wondered if he should have noticed that. A part of him still felt like he was moving in a dream. He looked back up the passageway they had fallen down, willing himself to concentrate. It was dark, but Felicity was right – not so dark that they couldn't make out one another and other objects in the tunnel.

“It must not have completely sealed. Light coming in means air coming in, so we won't suffocate.” He leaned back against the wall and patted the space beside him; she settled herself in.

Together, they contemplated their options. To the right, the gaping pit blocked access to the tunnel leading back to the mines. To the left, the tunnel they had fallen down had been transformed into a sharply sloping pile of rock and rubble. Oliver shifted, tucking her more tightly against him. The temperature seemed to be dropping. “Should we play rocks-paper-scissors to decide who eats who?” Then, because she immediately opened her mouth to correct him, “I know, I know, we'll die of thirst before we die of hunger.”

She looked at him indignantly. “That wasn't what I was going to say." She paused. "I also wasn't going to mention that it's who eats  _whom_.” He started to protest, but she ignored him, looking thoughtfully up the tunnel at the impenetrable wall of dirt. “The gap letting in the light - it’s probably towards the top, don't you think?”

“I would guess so, yeah. Why?” He was looking now too, searching for a break in the earth. If they could widen it somehow... but he knew that cave-ins were deceptive. The soil that had fallen so easily, once at rest, was almost impossible to shift without a massive or a very concentrated force.

“So, what if we could kind of... nudge it? Make it a little wider?”

“With what?” He knew better than to dismiss one of Felicity's ideas, and the look on her face told him there was something she wasn't saying. “Something you want to share with the rest of the class, Felicity?” There is was again; an unmistakable flash of guilt. Slowly, she reached around behind her and drew something out of her waistband.

“What is that?” He tried to keep his voice level. “Felicity, is that a flare gun? Have you been walking around with a flare gun in your pants?”

“Sort of? I mean, not before today. It's not like I've been wandering around with it in my pants for a month, or anything. It's been in my pack for a month – well, more than a month – see, Rocky gave it to me, he said they might be able to see it in Baron if we fired it from the plateau, and I just thought, after we beat Ra's, how nice would it be to have a ride home? You know, to not have to climb down that rock wall again? And that hike, I'm all out of granola bars, and Roy is just a _bear_ in the mornings....” Her voice trailed off. “Are you... are you mad?”

“That you brought an explosive device with us on a march through an abandoned mine that’s extremely vulnerable to cave-ins?” He sighed, pulled her in close, and kissed the top of her head. Then he wiped his mouth; her hair was caked in grit. “If I’m going to start getting mad about that kind of thing, we’d be too busy fighting to ever get out of here.”

Her voice was muffled against his chest. “You’re mashing my glasses. They just survived an avalanche, it would be a shame for them to get hugged to death.”

He drew her in more tightly, and felt her smile against him. She smelled like mud, gunpowder - and something else. Something sweet. Back home, she had always worn perfume, or maybe it was her shampoo - whatever it was, it reminded him of summer. Now, he realized that it hadn’t been the perfume after all - somehow, beneath the dirt and grime, she still smelled like sunshine.

After a moment, she pulled away and passed the gun over to him. “This feels more like your skill set than mine.”

He weighed it in his hands and looked at it doubtfully. “I feel like I should point out that firing this thing underground is far more likely to get us killed than save us.”

She shrugged, stood up, and offered her hand to help pull him up. “So what? You could say that about literally everything we do.” She looked again at the dirt wall, scanning it for any hint of a fracture. “I guess, just... aim high?”

She stepped into his outstretched arm and buried her face in his shoulder. He angled his body so that he would take the brunt of the debris, took aim and, at the last moment, turned his own face away. She curled herself against him, her glasses digging into his neck, her breath warm on his skin.  
  
He grinned against her hair. He felt indecently happy for someone who was probably about to die. “I always do.”

*******************


	21. Chapter 21

Tommy tried not to focus on the faces of the men as they gave way before his knife. They seemed to be moving in slow motion, and he realized that, while he had been training with the Kawani, these men had trained only against other League members. Would his own fighting have been this scripted, without months of honing his skills against N'sal's ferocity, Oliver's power, Roy's boundless energy? The movements were as predictable as the foxtrot steps that his grandmother had insisted he learn in long summer afternoons at the country club, hands damp and sweaty on the backs of girls who had towered over him, rolling their eyes - he had imagined - at one another over his head.

His hands were wet now, but not with sweat. The other man was so close to him they may as well have been dancing. The knife made an ugly sucking noise as Tommy drew it out of the wound in the other man's stomach, shoving him at the same time so that he went staggering backwards, turning away, not wanting to see whether the eyes glazed over in death or fluttered closed in pain.

A whisper of air kissed his cheek as an arrow flew by and lodged itself in a would-be attacker.

"I think that's the last of them." Roy shouldered his bow as he came up to stand beside Tommy. His voice was even, his breathing steady.

"Apprentices," Kaya's voice was cool and unimpressed. "N'sal must have drawn most of the masters to the gate." One would have to know her very well to detect the quaver under the dry, neutral tone.

"Well, hey, don't fall all over yourself thanking us. It was nothing." Roy was either oblivious to the undercurrent of concern, or was trying to distract them from it.

Kaya arched a single brow. "Oh, were you looking for applause? Check back with me once we've made it past some actual assassins." She surveyed the collection of groaning or unconscious men covering the floor, and delicately stepped over one as though he was a mud puddle, smoothly gliding out of his reach as he cracked open bloodied eyes and stretched out a pathetic hand. She carefully picked her way through the detritus towards the door. "If we don't hurry up, we're going to be the last ones there. I know you guys don't want to miss the big finale." Her tone was light, and Tommy knew that she was avoiding the more likely scenario - that, if they made it to the throne room at all, they might be the only ones who did.

He started after her, but was stopped by the same beseeching hand. He looked down, intending simply to move out of reach, as she had, and froze.

It was the man whom Roy's last arrow had dropped. He was wrestling now to reach where it had lodged in his side, but it was his eyes that had stopped Tommy in his tracks. This was what he had dreaded, why he had avoided meeting the gaze of the men they were fighting; for fear that the faces looking back at him would be ones he remembered from his time here. Not friends, perhaps, but cohorts. Fellow sufferers, which was a bond that sometimes could be seared more deeply than that of friendship. And the eyes looking back at him now were ones he could not have forgotten - not because of their deep-set, flinty hardness, but because of their defiance. It was a defiance that had so often been directed straight ahead, meeting Tommy's, in the apprentice quarters where most people kept their lids hooded, watching the ground before.

"Help." It was a command more than a request, and it clearly pained the man to soften it. "Help me and I'll help you." He couldn't reach the arrow.

They didn't have time for this, but with the voice, another memory came out of the shadows, packing a punch as hard as anything the assassins had offered so far. The night after Tommy had undergone his first day of "training," the pain had been blinding - worse even than after he had lost his arm - and he genuinely thought that he might not survive. He had lain awake, because when he closed his eyes, there was nothing to distract him from the nauseating, dizzying waves of pain.

And then - relief. Soothing coolness. Not enough to take away the pain, but enough to ease it so that he could breathe without wracking shudders.

And that equally cool and neutral voice, issuing from somewhere above the business-like hands that smoothed the dark green ointment over the worst of his wounds. _"If you tell, they'll kill me._ " Like now, it hadn't been a request. Simply a statement of fact; the man had made the choice not to watch Tommy suffer, and now Tommy could make his own choice about whether to score points with their masters by selling him out.

Despite this, it wasn't gratitude that made him pause - he was sure that if he polled the room, he would find other faces he recognized, recall other stolen, desperate moments of kindness, gestures of solace pried from the iron grip of the unforgiving training regime. But Jack....

He reminded him of Oliver, Tommy realized. That was what it was. It the moments of searing pain, it had been more than the algal ointment that Jack had offered him. His stoic, silent presence; his determined recklessness; his surly generosity. When Tommy had believed that his best friend was lost to him forever, Jack had offered him a few moments of feeling close to him again.

Their was one arrow protruding from his side, and another, sustained earlier, in his shoulder blade. Jack might be able to reach them, but if he pulled them out from that angle, they would do more damage coming out than they had going in. If he wasn't careful, he could bleed out. And judging by his frantic grasping, he wasn't going to be careful.

"Shit," Tommy hissed, kneeling and, at the same time, sweeping the area with his good arm to ensure there was no detritus that Jack could use as a makeshift weapon.

"What are you doing, man?" Roy had returned to join him and was looking down at him in disbelief.

"Help me with this." Roy glared at him and didn't move. Still kneeling, Tommy wrestled Jack onto his side and braced his own foot against the other man's back. Then, with one hand, he began carefully to work the arrow out of his back, watching for telltale spurts of blood that would let him know he'd moved it the wrong way.

"Oh, for Christ's sake..." Roy gave in, joining Tommy on the ground, and began to work on the arrow in Jack's side. The prone man, who had been gritting his teeth in silence, finally gave into the pain and passed out. The men around them who were still conscious, some of whom had been trying to get to their feet, fell still and watched in silence.

"Sorry, I forgot the first aid kit. Otherwise I'd be passing out band-aids." Kaya had returned as well, and now, after tapping her foot impatiently, huffed an impatient sigh and dropped to Tommy's side. "You are making a mess of this," she hissed between gritted teeth. Tommy wasn't sure if she was referring to the wound or the mission, but figured either could be equally true.

"I'm paying a debt." He tried to sound simple and noble, but had a disheartening feeling that it came out sounding apologetic.

"This is what you get for siding with the good guys." Kaya elbowed him out of the way, more sharply than was strictly necessary, and went to work on the arrow. Roy, who had worked a bit more recklessly than Tommy, had gotten his free and was now tearing a length of fabric off of Jack's robe to bind the wound.

Tommy stood to survey the scene. Barring head wounds, everyone should be OK. There was a leg wound that was bleeding heavily on a young man in a corner who stared at him with wide eyes as he approached - he went over and tore a length of fabric off of his own shirt to use as a bandage.

"Over here!" A voice rang out over the crowd, and Tommy saw a boy crumpled in the corner. His friend, next to him, had spoken up in a voice pitched high with fear - and youth, Tommy realized. They couldn't have been older than 13.

The boy was bleeding copiously from his head, but it looked worse than it was. Tommy bandaged it anyway, to appease the boy's friend, and then Kaya was done with Jack. As the three of them stood and made their way to the door, Tommy realized that a few of their opponents had found their feet in the time that they had taken to provide first aid. They were gathered uncertainly by the door, but didn't appear eager to attack.

"We can knock you out again," Tommy offered. "But I'd rather not. I used to be one of you - I know what it's like. You come here because you think it's going to make you a great warrior - or because you have nowhere else to go. And then they start beating you, and suddenly it's not about what you can become, or where you can go - it's just about doing what you need to do to get by." He paused, and said, honestly, "I really don't want to beat you, too."

It wasn't a great speech, he reflected. Oliver would have done it better.

There was a long, uncertain moment before, avoiding both his gaze and one another's, they stepped aside. It was probably less because of his speech and more because they were still bewildered by being attacked and then immediately tended to by the same group of people, but it was something. Tommy figured he might as well push his luck.

"Know of any routes for us to get to the throne room without running into armies of angry assassins?" He made his tone casual, as though he was asking for directions to the nearest bathroom. For a moment, he thought that it might work.

But when the answer came, it was from behind them.

"I'll take you." Jack shouldn't have been conscious, let alone vertical. But his movements were surprisingly strong and assured, and they weren't in a position to turn down allies. Besides, Tommy reflected, they didn't have to trust him to use him - and if he was leading them into a trap, it couldn't be much worse than their own plan, which was basically to head directly for the center of the compound and hope for the best.

Tommy stepped aside, gesturing for Jack to lead the way. He, Roy and Kaya closed ranks behind him, and together they made their way towards the dark heart of the League.

********************

Everything was dark. That was OK, though - wasn't it? There was a reason for it to be dark, she was pretty sure. There was definitely a good reason for that, and for the ringing in her ears, too, and if she just closed her eyes for another minute or so, she would think of what it was.

But her alarm was going off, saying her name. Over and over. When had she gotten an alarm that said her name?

"Five more minutes," she muttered. But it came out, "Fmrmppphh."

"Felicity. Felicity!" Now her alarm was shaking her by the shoulder. Rude.

" _Five,_ " she said, very clearly. " _More. Minutes._ "

"Felicity, we have to go!" Not an alarm -a  voice. Her eyes opened without permission from her brain, and the most beautiful, beloved face in the world was hovering over her, filled with urgency and concern. She closed her eyes again. She could always look at him later.

But he kept shaking her. If this was going to work, they were really going to have to have a conversation about boundaries.

"OK! God." She raised herself on her elbows and peered around, blinking. Darkness, waves of thick dust, and - suddenly the reason for the darkness came flooding back to her in a rush.

He had been lying on top of her, her face muffled against his chest, shielding her from the worst of the cave-in. That was why it had seemed so dark. Now, as he sat up next to her, she realized that the light was streaming in from a massive hole in what, moments before, had been a solid wall of earth in front of them. Their plan had worked.

But even as they as they surveyed the hole, another chunk of earth fell from the ceiling above, grazing Felicity's arm near the cuff. She jumped back, rebounding against the solid warmth of Oliver.

"Are you OK?" He pulled up the sleeve on her robe to check the cut, and Felicity craned her neck to watch. As moved his hand over it, a little blood smeared across the cuff, casting the engravings in a bright, rusty brown and highlighting the solitary female figure, holding her bow, so that for a moment she seemed to glow.

Suddenly, Felicity was wide awake.

"We have to go," she said. She tugged at her sleeve and then grabbed Oliver's arm, attempting to haul him after her. "Oliver, we have to go right now!"

"I know, that's what I've been saying!" He made it to his feet and then caught her as, nearly frantic, she over-balanced and started to tip over in the opposite direction. "Another avalanche could start at any second. We have to get out of here."

"No, I mean - well, yes, that too, but - listen!" She turned back to talk as he guided her to the opening in the wall, placed one hand around each of her hips, and hoisted. "I thought it didn't matter who made it to the throne room, but I think it does. We shouldn't have left N'sal out there alone - I think she's the one -- " she grunted as Oliver, with one final shove, got her through the hole and into the upper half of the tunnel, where there was no longer a wall separating it from the cellar, and turned to help him through. "The old man said the bracelet knew the end, right? And he sang a song. I mean, I don't know about the song. He was pretty old. He seemed pretty with it, not like he had dementia or anything, although you never know, I guess. I mean, he seemed pretty lucid to me...." Oliver boosted himself through the hole, avoiding the half-hearted assistance Felicity offered when she wasn't busy gesticulating. "Look, the bracelet shows N'sal. See? N'sal!" She shoved her wrist in Oliver's face. He winced and pulled back, trying to understand what she was talking about, but she kept going. "I think it has to be N'sal who delivers the serum, because if the bracelet shows the ending to the story, then she's the ending! She's the leader. She has to be the one to do it, or it might not work. Do you see?"

Oliver spoke carefully. "If you believe it, I believe it. Let me just see, for a second...." He pulled her face close and began to examine her head carefully.

She jerked back. "Oliver, I didn't hit my head! Look, we're in a land of magical algae. Isn't it possible that the same people who figured out how to stay alive indefinitely also figured out how to catch glimpses into the future?" Even as she said it, she realized how ridiculous it sounded. But Oliver surprised her by looking thoughtful.

"Yes, but... Felicity, does it matter? We can't get to N'sal now. Let's say that it's true, and that your bracelet is trying to tell us that N'sal should be the one to lead us into defeat against Ra's al Ghul. Hasn't she already done that? She breached the front gate. Whatever we're able to do will be because she created that distraction. Whether or not she makes it, the bracelet will still have shown the future."

Whether or not she makes it. Felicity tried not to let her mind linger on the words. "I guess so," she said, dully, but she didn't believe it. The old man had said that the bracelet showed the end of the story, and breaching the front gate wasn't the ending. It had to be N'sal, or it wouldn't work. It didn't make a lot of rational sense, and Felicity hated when something wasn't rational, but she had known all along that the bracelet was important - why else had she guarded it so carefully? But Oliver was right - there was no way to get to her now. They just had to get to the throne room themselves and hope that she would be there, too.

  
********************

  
Waves of darkness that she crashed against, broke through, and rose to crash against again. Her muscles were screaming in agony and so was she; she had lost count of how many times she had fallen, how many blades had pierced her, but her heart pounded with a fierce, frantic joy that she hadn't known she could still feel.

The waves were coming faster now, until they converged around her. The robes were pure black, with flashes of crimson and purple - no longer apprentices, then. The masters had been drawn to the main gate. She spared a thought for Tommy and Kaya, a moment to be glad that she had cleared their way, but the battle demanded all of her attention.

She wasn't taking them down as quickly, and they were getting up faster. It wouldn't be long now. Her arms were growing heavy, and she dropped her swords, prepared to kill with her bare hands - as many as she could, for as long as she could. Her sight grew dim, and she wasn't sure if it was because they were closing in or because the dark cloaks were converging on her.

Then - a break in the darkness, and a blade that flashed like sunlight. Tommy? No. Not a knife - a sword. And a face above it, his concentration not masking that he, too, was lost in the joy of battle.

He was spinning away from her, and more and more of them were falling, until only the two of them stood; or at least, she tried to stand, to face her rescuer. He was hauntingly familiar, and somewhere inside of her, a memory was screaming to be released.

But she was so tired, and she had done it - she would not be the one to plunge the poison into Ra's al Ghul's veins, but one of her friends or family would, and her people would return to claim their place. Once again, a young man would row to the center of the underground pool and lie back to see his heart shimmering before him in starlight; and once again, a woman would lay claim to their land and future. It wouldn't be her, but somewhere in her bones, N’sal had always known that no man was going to see her face in the stars.

She was falling. She closed her eyes, wondering if she would, in her final moments, see Tommy, or her mother, or Kaya. But there was only this - her heart fluttering like wings, and her vision growing higher and higher, rising like the sun over her land.

She fell, but didn't hit the ground. Instead, an arm encircled her waist. She didn't open her eyes, but the pulse at her throat meant that she wasn't gone yet. The man, still breathing heavily from the battle, reached for something in his pocket, and forced it between her lips. The effect was immediate. Her cheeks flushed with color, and she sighed and seemed to sink into a deep sleep, rather than death.

"I don't believe we've officially met." The man smiled down at her almost paternally, and spoke quietly, as though confident that she could hear him. "My name is Malcolm."


End file.
